A Thousand Times They Say

A Thousand Times They Say is an experimental observational documentary film by Ingel Vaikla & Sakis Brönnimann commissioned by Europalia for the exhibition Georgia: A Story of Encounters at the Art and History Museum in Brussels, Belgium.

The film takes the viewer from the streets of Tbilisi to the Shuamta nunnery, from the rock-cut mountain complex in Vardzia to the Alaverdi monastery and from the Svaneti towers to the remote Ushguli village, allowing the viewer to enter major cathedrals as well as intimate churches, both ancient and more contemporary. The film looks at the people in their religious rituals and more intimate daily actions in order to give the architectural sites its sense of space via its communities. Through its multiple encounters, the film focuses on the abstract gestures and the repetition of sound to convey a notion of timelessness in the bigger story of religion. A Thousand Times They Say weaves together landscapes, villages and its architectural sites with chants of the orthodox tradition in order to propose a film as a contemporary visual polyphony of Georgia today.