Robert is a guardian spirit of the Georgian Film movie studio. One of the world's oldest film studios, Kartuli Pilmi was among the most active Soviet film production spots. The fall of the USSR was followed by hard times for the studio and many of its treasures are now gone. But what could be saved was saved by the hands of Robert and others like him. These silent heroes fight every day to salvage the studio's unique assets, from thousands of cans of documentary films shot over the last 100 years to the studio's unrivalled sound archive.
My new project is about these heroes, and Robert’s portrait is first in this series.
Robert is studio's oldest sound engineer. Since his first day at Kartuli Pilmi in 1957, he recorded sounds for more than 600 feature films, documentaries and animation pictures. Today, when the film production at the studio is rare, and Robert works as a keeper of a unique Georgian film archive.
Poster mockups
Apart from being a part of my personal project, this photo shoot has an additional goal: one of the resulting images will appear on a poster for Georgian director Khatuna Khundadze's latest documentary film. The film features Robert as its main character (it is the second documentary film to be about him and his work at the studios).
Behind the scenes
We also documented the whole process of pre-production and production on video with DSLR and
GoPro cameras.
Photographer/editor: Andrew Kovalev (ckovalev.com)
Set designers: Andrew Kovalev, Tatiana Blinova
Videographer/assistant: Thomas Burns (thomasburns.net)
Special thanks to:
the staff of Georgian Film studios
Khatuna Khundadze
Robert
