Niko Pirosmani, born into a peasant family in nineteenth-century Georgia, became a major figure in naive painting. But he struggled with poverty, and his fame only came after he had died from starvation and alcoholism. His story is told in Giorgi Shengelaia’s melancholic and majestic, image-driven masterpiece. It’s a tribute to an old-world Georgia and purist conception of artistic integrity the director believes to have died out under rampant commercialism and the rise of modern technology. (Carmen Gray)