Architecture stands as a silent witness and a mirror to social policies, divisions, and colonial struggles—fortunate are the regimes under which life becomes a museum of preserved layers of the past, even those difficult to face, rather than a purgatory for all that preceded it.
The territory of present-day Georgia has been occupied throughout history by a succession of powers: from ancient Rome to Persian dynasties, Arab caliphates, the Seljuks, the Mongols, and the Ottomans. In modern times, the most lasting impact has come from the Russian Empire’s occupation for much of the nineteenth century, followed in the early twentieth by absorption into the Soviet Union, which endured until the 1990s. Two centuries of uninterrupted dominance by Russian power structures have left the country struggling to free itself from the Russian sphere of influence. In the twenty-first century, Georgia has only intermittently succeeded in this endeavor.
For their own purposes, imperial and Soviet authorities at times introduced infrastructure to parts of Georgia that had previously lacked it or had it only in rudimentary form. The Ottomans had already known of Georgia’s thermal springs, but it was in the Russian Empire that these sites turned into modern spa resorts with grand, monumental architecture. The benefits of Georgia’s landscape and air quality took on an almost mythical dimension. An imperial-era legend tells of a magical Caucasian mountain that could cure respiratory ailments, such as those that had plagued Grigory Alexandrovich Romanov since childhood. After he was cured of tuberculosis in Abastumani, fate still claimed him—he died colliding with a tree, fatally injuring his chest. His heart was buried in Abastumani, until the Soviets erased the memory of it, replacing the landmark with a monument to the newly established order.
This story is told in the background of Mariam Chachia‘s film Magic Mountain (2023) by the director herself, who fell ill with tuberculosis and underwent treatment in the isolated Abastumani sanatorium built during the monarchy, three hours’ drive southeast from Kutaisi. In recent times, the building had become a poorly maintained centre for a constant turnover of patients, many of whom returned for recovery multiple times.
Chachia, together with co-director and cinematographer Nik Voigt, worked with the material filmed over five years, from 2014 to 2019. It documents the very end of the Abastumani complex, which was demolished in the spring of 2019. The narration discloses why—the fate of this culturally significant heritage site was decided by a powerful but unnamed figure, who chose to repurpose it for private use. Those knowledgeable or curious enough will recognise the unspoken name of Bidzina Ivanishvili, Georgia’s wealthiest citizen, an oligarch who in the 2000s returned from the Russian Federation after amassing fortune in the chaos of the 1990s. He is also the founder of Georgian Dream, the country’s leading party.
Although previously brought under control, tuberculosis reached epidemic proportions in Georgia after the collapse of the USSR. Contributing factors included the violent loss of territory in the late twentieth century—the de facto secession of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the loss of the Kodori Valley and the city of Tskhinvali. These territorial changes left refugees in dire living conditions, with poor access to medical care, and their status remained unresolved even thirty years after displacement. Another major challenge became the resistance of the mycobacteria’s strains to antibiotics. The situation began to improve during the years Magic Mountain was being filmed.
The scenes of treatment in Abastumani during the late 2010s expose both the system’s inability to care for and restore the health of patients, and moments of individual irresponsibility within an economically compromised society. The sanatorium’s spaces are dilapidated, only crudely adapted into hospital rooms, clinics, dining hall, and other functional areas. Even in a collapsing institution and without any help from the overbearing oligarch, the staff remain agile and dedicated, joined by the almost stereotypical figure of the stern Russian specialist. While everyone else speaks Georgian, the doctor addresses patients exclusively in Russian, a language still widely understood by the population. Chachia’s perspective shifts between cool, measured critique and a nightmarish sense of arrival to and wandering through the sanatorium’s vast spaces. The narrated descriptions and closeups, such as that of a fly trapped between the layers of a windowpane, make the filmed reality edge closer to the reference in the title—Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924).
Georgia’s Ministry of Culture has labelled Chachia and Voigt’s film a fraudulent project. In response to this and similar attacks on other filmmakers, the Georgian film community launched the initiative Georgian Cinema Is in Danger and began to self-organize independently of the Georgian National Film Center. Alongside dismantling the myth of life in Soviet Georgia as a lived utopia, as well the myth of an anticipated one in the present day, the film employs a range of rare techniques that estrange the imperial building from its oddly improvised practical functions. The camera’s gaze on the architecture is often oblique rather than frontal, favouring diagonal angles. Shots are at times also deliberately blurred to evoke a disoriented state of mind, while the director addresses the sanatorium in the first person.
The question of refugees from Abkhazia, displaced after the externally instigated civil war of 1993, is addressed more directly in Hotel Metalurg (2023) by Jeanne Nouchi and George Varsimashvili. Like Chachia and Voigt, the directors peer inside the walls of a neglected building, for the past thirty years inhabited by refugee families. This former sanatorium is located in the town of Tskaltubo, about a fifteen-minute drive northwest of Kutaisi, once a place entirely organized around spa tourism. In Soviet times, Tskaltubo was connected to Moscow by a direct railway line, and its sanatoriums welcomed both the nomenklatura and the working class. The town thrived on tea production, textile processing, and trade in jams, brandy, wines, chandeliers, shoes, and more. Such well-organized environments truly gave the impression of a utopia achieved under the former regime and were rooted in the effective use of the area’s natural assets. Further on, investments in infrastructure were carefully planned, regardless of the living conditions and obligations society faced outside this microcosm of total design.
Hotel Metalurg—formerly the Metalurgi workers’ sanatorium—is the work of renowned architects Valerian Kedia, Natalia Soloviova, and Ioseb Zaalishvili, credited with numerous significant projects at the transition between Stalinist neoclassicism and late modernism. Completed in 1957, the four-storey building features large arched windows adorned with stone carvings. At its centre stands a circular hall with columns, above which rises a gallery with a balustrade, a ceiling adorned with elaborate stuccowork, and a large glass chandelier—a focal point even in the film.
In the early 2020s, buildings like the Metalurg began to be privatized. The film follows this repurposing alongside the lives of the last residents of the once much more populated complex. It was designated a cultural monument only in 2021. Since 2022, the Georgian government has been running the investment program New Life of Tskaltubo, aimed at selling fourteen former sanatoriums and transforming the area into a destination for luxury spa tourism. In principle, spa treatments still take place there today but not on the planned scale. In the film, some of the details of this story are revealed through the news heard from the radio.
The families still living in the Metalurg during the making of the film—mostly single mothers with children—display a particular kind of anxiety at the prospect of leaving their inadequate living space. The communal nature of life in the Metalurg, impossible to recreate following the already numerous relocations from the place, evokes a certain nostalgia. This is especially true among the children who grew up playing together in the complex’s monumental spaces. Low-key cinematography and an observational camera approaching the Metalurg’s residents closer than Voigt’s camera in Magic Mountain bring the viewer nearer to the reality of a daily life once again unfolding in a state of adaptation—in temporary solutions for which there are currently no alternatives, and the future of them is uncertain.
Because of its architectural appeal, the Metalurg is occasionally visited by newlyweds looking to take their wedding photographs, while children turn the central circular lobby into a scooter track and play tag. Much like in the Abastumani sanatorium, rooms never intended for residential use have been converted—often in inventive ways—into makeshift condominiums, each with its share of flaws. The camera lingers on shared spaces: the lobby, the gallery, and the abandoned cinema and theatre hall, where the women chattering reveal that men once locked themselves inside to watch porns together. There is hardly a single corner of the building that has not been repurposed to serve small human pleasures and needs in some way. Ruined as it may be by such acts and interventions, the Metalurg’s architecture has also, through them, continued to live—a life distinctive and intriguing from both a sociological and a technical perspective.
Because of its history as well as the structural limitations of grappling with its material heritage, Georgia is still full of spaces that, to a foreign eye, appear strange and hybrid in function. This has been changing rapidly since the 2020s, though not always for the better. National architecture, and its specific forms shaped by social dynamics since the 1990s, has also been the subject of earlier documentaries such as Bakhmaro (2011) by Salomé Jashi and Pirimze (2014) by Sophia Tabatadze. However, in more recent years, directors have gravitated toward distinctly poetic approaches, more complex narratives, and technically ever more impressive studies of places caught in a state outside of time, suspended between utopia and disappointment. Georgia’s remarkable and endangered architecture includes many fascinating projects in harmonious dialogue with the landscape, fortunately preserved in all their social complexity in the country’s new documentary cinema.