What Does The Mud Whisper
Georgia2025documentary18'Short Film Competition
In the Georgian bathhouse of Akhtala, visitors from all over the country enjoy healthy mud baths. Five-year-old Tako spends her summer waiting for her grandmother, who works as a laundress at the spa. Monotonous days become an excuse for the girl to create her own world, full of imaginative characters derived from ancient legends and myths. In these stories, mud turns into a magical substance, and she herself becomes a princess. The film is a poetic observation of childhood and the power of imagination, which enables the most mundane reality to be transformed into a space of dreams.
- directed by
- Dea Tcholokava
A Georgian filmmaker with an academic foundation in social-political sciences, cinema, and fiction filmmaking, studied across Georgia and Germany. In 2022–2023, she participated in platforms like Dok.Leipzig Market, B2B Doc, and MDAG Short Pitch, winning Best Pitch at CineDoc, TISFF, and TIFF. She received a production grant from the GNFC for her debut short, The Mud Princess (now What Does the Mud Whisper). Dea has collaborated with the Caucasian media platform Chai Khana on films like Traffic Diary and Of Kids and Sea and worked as an editor and assistant director alongside esteemed Georgian filmmakers Lana Gogoberidze, Tato Kotetishvili, Bakur Bakuradze, and others.
- Producer
- Irina Gelashvili / Radium Films (Radium Films)
- Distributor
- Lucie Zelena / East Silver Caravan (East Silver Caravan)
- Cinematography
- Bartosz Błędowski
- Music
- Nika Phaniashvili
- Sound
- Paata Godziashvili
- Editing
- Eka Tsotsoria, Dea Tcholokava
- Photo
