“Smiling Georgia”: Politics rotten at the root4 min read
Smiling Georgia (2023), directed by Luka Beradze, follows elderly villagers in rural Georgia left toothless — literally — by an abandoned state dental programme. What began as a populist election gesture ended with a change of government and hundreds of people never receiving their promised prosthetics. The film is a quiet, precise portrait of political indifference and its human cost.
Imagine living in a small village of a small country when one day you are bundled into a minivan with other villagers and driven to the regional centre, where dentists from the capital will remove your damaged teeth — free of charge, they promise — and fit you with a brand-new prosthetic. Because the president wants people to smile more. Coincidentally, he has this idea during his pre-election campaign, and as elections approach, his team scrambles to finish extracting the damaged teeth of the country’s citizens. It sounds bizarre, but it is, in its way, a transaction: new teeth, new smile, at a fraction of the normal price — your vote.
Now imagine the president loses the election and a new party comes to power. Does that mean they will finish giving citizens their new smiles? Apparently not. The mobile clinics vanish, leaving you with nothing — not even your damaged originals — no answers and no hope. This is not some elaborate hypothetical; it is the ready-made plot of a satirical film, and what a premise at that. But it is also the lived reality of some people in Georgia, and the film exists — not as dark comedy, but as a documentary.
Smiling Georgia is a 62-minute film that follows elderly residents of Usakhelo, a village in western Georgia — the name translates as “nameless”, a detail that feels too pointed to be accidental — who were among the beneficiaries of the Smiling Georgia project. Introduced as a populist gesture by Mikheil Saakashvili, the third president of Georgia, the programme aimed at rural communities where dental care was financially out of reach. It ended abruptly when Saakashvili’s United National Movement (UNM) lost the 2012 elections to the now-ruling Georgian Dream party, leaving many of its recipients toothless, in every sense. No explanation was offered. No apology given.
The film has the spare, unhurried quality of documentary work that trusts its subjects entirely — and its subjects do not disappoint. These are people of extraordinary dignity, meeting an extraordinary absurdity with the bittersweet humour and quick wit that the western Georgian region of Imereti is known for. They waited for teeth that never came. They are still waiting. The state came, took what it needed — their teeth, their trust, their vote — and receded without a word.
The film’s power lies in its refusal to editorialize. Beradze does not need to underscore the metaphor; it announces itself. What sharpens the film further is that the footage was recorded in 2020, with elections once again looming. We watch politicians arrive in the village trailing fresh promises, talking loudly and delivering nothing. For close observers of Georgian politics, the film is a precise study in Georgian Dream’s relationship with its electorate: one of complete and utter indifference. Ignorance for people’s needs is visible from the party’s earliest days in power and impossible to dismiss after fourteen years in office.
Smiling Georgia ‘s most powerful sequence follows a journalist from a pro-government channel who arrives in the village searching for residents left toothless by the original programme. Her vicious pursuit, her contempt for the people she is ostensibly there to represent, and her sheer determination to manufacture a story at any cost are by turns infuriating and revealing. It is one of the sharpest pieces of media criticism in recent Georgian cinema — a reminder that the appetite of populist media to exploit human suffering is not a Georgian problem alone, though Georgian television provides as instructive an example as any.
Cinematographer Lomer Akhvlediani keeps his camera close and his interventions minimal. The film moves at the pace of the village itself: unhurried, watchful, glad to linger on a local horse race, far less excited for the elections, and tired in the way that only people who have been let down repeatedly can be tired. Smiling Georgia does not overstay its welcome — if anything, you want more.
The film finishes with a small but quietly great scene, one worth leaving unspoiled. Smiling Georgia is available on Klassiki with English subtitles. It runs 62 minutes. It will stay with you considerably longer than that.
