Our Blood Is Wine

Earlier this afternoon, my dog was feeling “agitated,” as she put it, so she asked me to lie down on the couch with her and watch this doco. Emily Railsback’s Our Blood Is Wine is unpretentiously lovely and informative and reassuring. It’s a treat for people like me who love Georgian wine, food, music, cinema and culture. You should watch it too, especially if you know nothing about Georgia. See below for a hint on signing up to the streaming service I watched it on. NB. This is not a paid endorsement of this service. ||| TRR

Our Blood is Wine
A Film by Emily Railsback

“Embraces both its subjects and the audience in a kind of cultural exchange that you rarely find.”
—Third Coast Review

Filmmaker Emily Railsback and award-winning sommelier Jeremy Quinn provide intimate access to rural family life in the Republic of Georgia as they explore the rebirth of 8,000-year-old winemaking traditions almost lost during the period of Soviet rule.

By using unobtrusive iPhone technology, Railsback brings the voices and ancestral legacies of modern Georgians directly to the viewer, revealing an intricate and resilient society that has survived regular foreign invasion and repeated attempts to erase Georgian culture. The revival of traditional winemaking is the central force driving this powerful, independent and autonomous nation to find its 21st century identity.

Source: Ovid Email Newsletter, 19 November 2021

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Source: Facebook

Book Description

Book Description

Yulia Yakovleva is the author of the popular series of novels Leningrad Fairy Tales, in which the story of Stalin’s terror and the pre-war years is told with frightening and disarming naivety, because it is told by children for children.

Karina Dobrotvorskaya blew up the internet and reader communities thanks to the release of the novel Has Anyone seen my Girl? The film based on the novel, starring Anna Chipovskaya, Victoria Isakova and Alexander Gorchilin, was a hit.

The new novel, written by Yulia and Karina in collaboration, has everything that makes a work striking and memorable:

* an interesting, offbeat story about the distant future

* a love affair

* a detective story

* a uniquely designed world, described in detail

* a European feel that makes the novel look like a translation

The novel is about our near future, but it reads like a novel about the present.

In the new world, wokeness and the ecological revolution have triumphed. All emotions, except positive and non-confrontational ones, are prohibited. There are fines for violations. If you ate more than the norm, and an inspector finds you’re overweight, there’s also a fine. You can’t offend anyone, not even an ant.

How long can a person live amid such horror?

Yakovleva and Dobrotvorskaya write both ironically and seriously about the new ethics [political correctness], the cult of Greta Thunberg, people carried away with moral norms — and the fact that natural human nature will triumph anyway.

The novel combines the best of the authors’ talents: a fascinating plot from Yulia Yakovleva and Dobrotvorskaya’s subtle, profound psychological insight.

The novel is a niche leader.

Source: LitRes. Image courtesy of Ozon. Translated by the Russian Reader