Georgica

Georgica is a loose variation on Virgil's "Georgics" (29 BC), a poem on agriculture. Like the ancient Latin inspiration, the film is divided into four books or songs, taking up similar themes: the discussion and practice of apiculture, or the remembrance of foreign lands and wonders. But the latter already shows the differences in tone between Virgil and Keedus. If the former’s "Laudes Italiae" is truly a praise of culture, the memories of Africa that haunt Jakub, the sole person allowed to live on a barren island in newly Soviet Estonia, are of a more ambiguous nature. The authorities send a young mute lad there, to keep Jakub company. He calls him Maecenas, as a tribute to Gaius Cilnius Maecenas to whom Virgil dedicated the "Georgics", a work Jakub would love to translate into an African language. Difficult to say whether Jakub ever was in Africa or whether his memories are in reality dreams, visions evoked by images of the continent he collected as a child. All the while, Maecenas is wrestling with his own traumatic images, showing his mother lost in society's lower depths. An extraordinarily physical, even sensual piece of cinema that is deeply contemplative at the same time. (International Film Festival Rotterdam)