Smiling Georgia

What are the costs of the half-truths that politicians tell? In 2012, the Georgian president wanted to make the nation smile. In the race for re-election, the incumbent’s party was promising subsidised dental care to the country’s least well off. Across the land, state medical practitioners began removing rotten teeth with the promise of replacements in the months that followed — then the president lost. Through interviews with those worst affected by that campaign, Smiling Georgia is a tragicomedy about life in a remote Georgian village called ‘No Name’.

Building toward the 2021 re-election of the Georgian Dream party, who came to power in 2012 and have been in power ever since, Smiling Georgia is also a film about the transience of power, the things politicians will say to keep it, and the people who are always left to pay the bill. It’s also a film of quiet defiance: with or without the politicians’ carelessness, these are a people who never forgot how to smile.