“Prisoners of conscience” – A kaleidoscopic tale of the repression of dissent in Georgia at the 2026 goEast Festival of Central and Eastern European Film5 min read
This year’s GoEast Film Festival 2026 screened the movie Prisoners of conscience, a collective project by eleven Georgian film directors that presents a powerful critique of the government’s repressions and intimidations following the pro-EU protests started in November 2024. In this piece, Lossi 36’s South-East Europe Editor Riccardo Franceschetti reflects on the importance of this movie as testimony of the state of the freedom of expression in Georgia and the consequences for those who have participated in these mass protests, which have been shaking the country for the past two years.
Eleven stories, eleven directors, eleven political prisoners: through a sequence of short movies by some of the most acclaimed Georgian directors – including Salomé Jashi and Elene Naveriani – Prisoners of conscience sheds light on the price that thousands of citizens had to pay for protesting against their government. Arrests, intimidations, pressures against their families and farfetched accusations. Each individual story – different in their own way yet similar in plot and unfairness – provides a clear picture of the repression the nationalist, pro-Russian Georgian Dream government has put into place to face the mass protests that followed the halt of the negotiations for Georgia’s accession to the European Union.
The movie is a kaleidoscope of perspectives, styles and points of view. Each director presents the story of a single detainee, taking the audience into their lives and the suffering of their families, to compose a mosaic of the many shapes state repression takes to limit the freedom of expression of individuals and their communities. From children forced to grow without their father to empty houses where a now-prisoner took care of her mother, from football fans to human rights activists, Prisoners of conscience unfolds the stories of everyday citizens, the deeply personal impact that the mass arrests have had and the devastation for the loss of loved ones.
What particularly strikes the audience when watching this movie is that it does not portray the stories of dangerous criminals or radicalized insurrectionalists: most of the detainees are but ordinary people who, worried about the direction their country had taken, turned into protesters to fight for a better future. This gives the sense of how unpopular the choices of Georgian Dream have been, and how the citizens have felt the urge to mobilize against them.
Yet, rather counter-intuitively for the government, what Prisoners of conscience shows is that arresting the protesters has not stopped the protests, nor did it prevent future resentment towards the establishment. On the contrary, the repression has entailed a clear risk of multiplying the population’s dissatisfaction. The prisoners’ social baton is not being lost after their detention: it is being picked up by the respective families and dear ones. In basically all of the stories portrayed in the short movies, the relatives, friends and co-villagers of the detainees express not only the pain of seeing someone close being unfairly put into jail, but their willingness to continue their battle for a new and better Georgia.
Recent statistics on the protests equally uphold this conclusion. In fact, although the number of protests and the public’s participation have been declining since late 2024 and the beginning of 2025, they have been continuously held since then, reaching over 500 consecutive days of protest in April this year.
The creation of this movie is yet another testimony of this shared feeling among the population, as the project is meant as a collective form of resistance against a government that is increasingly hostile towards intellectuals and dissident voices. It was born under the auspices of the movement Georgian cinema is under threat, which brings together over 450 professionals of the country’s cinema sector, who are afraid of Georgian Dream’s tightening grip on the movie industry. It was launched in 2023, after then-Minister of Culture Tea Tsulukiani began reshaping Georgia’s National Film Centre – the main institution providing funds to film-makers – to hold more control over it, limiting funding to independent producers and favouring the movies that were favourable to the government. According to film-maker and former director of the Film Centre Gaga Chkheidze, the restructuring of the institution is a clear form of censorship and a way to avoid intellectuals’ criticism against the government’s positions. Chkheidze, who was dismissed from his director position in 2022, claims this was due to his criticism of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
On top of this, the Foreign Agents law introduced in 2024 also contains a component aimed at limiting the creative possibilities and criticism of film-makers: if film studios receive more than 20% of their funding from non-Georgian entities – which can include the funding given by the EU’s Creative Europe framework – they can be subject to financial penalties and increased scrutiny from the government. All of this creates a climate of fear, intimidation and direct threats from Georgian Dream, which contributes to making self-censorship an extra tool for restricting the freedom of filmmakers and their capacity to criticize the government.
Georgian cinema is under threat thus decided to boycott the work of the Centre, while launching other initiatives like the free screening of movies in rural areas of the country to spread awareness and open discussions with the citizens.
It is against this backdrop that Prisoners of conscience should be watched and understood. This collective project is both a contribution to the wider fight for Georgia’s freedom and an important testimony for anyone seeking to understand the situation in the country. Most of all, it provides a powerful picture – that is both intimate and strongly political – of how these issues are perceived by Georgians, and the resilience they show amidst an increasingly hostile and repressive environment.
Prisoners of conscience (2025) was screened as part of the 2026 goEast Festival of Central and Eastern European Film.
