Georgian cinema keeps arriving at the world’s festivals the same way — small, deadpan, shot close to the bone — and keeps punching far above the size of the industry that makes it. So when a film about a hazelnut farmer in a half-forgotten western province becomes both a sales agent’s new priority and a country’s official standard-bearer at the Academy Awards in the same week, it says less about one movie than about how much Georgia has learned to wager on its own directors.

Levan Koguashvili’s Guria is that film. As Deadline first reported, the Paris-based outfit Loco Films has boarded international sales on the drama and released a first trailer, moving on the title before a single public screening — the kind of pre-premiere commitment sellers reserve for projects they believe will travel.

Koguashvili is not an unknown quantity to that bet. His Brighton 4th swept the top prizes at Tribeca in 2021 and became Georgia’s Oscar submission that year, following the wry working-class portraits of Street Days and Blind Dates. Guria, shot in stark black-and-white, returns him to his native soil: a widowed hazelnut grower who refuses the insulting price offered for his harvest and goes looking for a better one — and, prodded by friends, for a new wife his formidable ex-mother-in-law is unlikely to approve. Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera has called it a very funny comedy that continues the traditions of Georgian cinema.

The picture’s financing map explains part of the appeal: lead-produced by Kino Iberica in Tbilisi, it draws partners from Switzerland, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Turkey, Norway and Saudi Arabia — the patchwork by which a tiny national cinema now funds itself and pre-sells its way onto the circuit. For a sales company, an Oscar submission stamped onto a Venice premiere is a ready-made campaign: two institutional votes of confidence a buyer can point to before the reviews land.

Guria holds its world premiere in the Spotlight section of the Venice Film Festival, which runs September 2 to 12, and stands as Georgia’s entry for Best International Feature at the 99th Academy Awards. Kakhaber Tcholadze leads the cast alongside Natia Nikolaishvili and Vamekh Jangidze.

That a monochrome comedy about a man who won’t sell his hazelnuts cheap has become Georgia’s loudest pitch to Hollywood is its own kind of punchline — and Loco Films is betting the rest of the world is in on it.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, festival-deal, Georgian cinema, Guria, Levan Koguashvili, Loco Films