A poetic portrait of Giorgi Shakhsuvarian, an Armenian boxing coach from Tbilisi. While working and living in Belgium, he prepares a young boxer for his European championship. The film melds a sense of distance, the floating experience of time and space, and the choreography of boxing.
Inside the Distance is a poetic portrait of Giorgi Shakhsuvarian, an Armenian boxing coach from Tbilisi. Residing and working in Belgium, he prepares a young boxer for his European championship. The film weaves together a sense of distance, a floating experience of time and space, and the choreography of boxing.
“‘Will my heart be big enough to bridge the distance?’, we hear him ask while looking at the world map and using his fist as measure, as he prepares to return to his hometown after an absence of thirteen years. It is this sense of displacement, of a belonging never fully attained, that resounds in Elias Grootaers’ Inside the Distance. Spaces find themselves diffused and multiplied into patterns of lines and dots, no longer knowing centre from margin. Human figures dissolve into plays of shadows and silhouettes, where they come to waver between actual presence and virtual absence, as if the play of framing and masking, of fragmenting and multiplying, evokes a perpetual state where bodies are never really ‘at home’. Perhaps this exploration of cinematic spaces, where identity and temporality become unsettled, ultimately corresponds to the experience of what one of Giorgi’s friends describes as ‘floating through life’: a poetics of dislocation.”
Stoffel Debuysere
“Spaces find themselves diffused and multiplied into patterns of lines and dots, no longer knowing centre from margin. Human figures dissolve into plays of shadows and silhouettes, where they come to waver between actual presence and virtual absence, as if the play of framing and masking, of fragmenting and multiplying, evokes a perpetual state where bodies are never really ‘at home’.”
Stoffel Debuysere
“(...) filming his documentary with freedom and creativity; the frame is often empty or cut across briefly by the actors: this too conveys the speed of boxing; the alternation between this and moments of reflection in Georgia; archive images of family films with their faded colours, which are alternated with the black and white of the present.”
Roberto Oggiano
