Manchester Animation Festival

When the Sea Was Calm

Dir. Mamuka Tkeshelashvili | Georgia

Summer, 1992. In a sun-drenched city on the Black Sea coast, a thirteen-year-old boy spends the season with his friends: riding his bicycle, playing football, swimming, and moving through the city with the freedom of childhood. During this final peaceful summer, he falls in love for the first time with a girl who has come to Sokhumi with her restless little dog.

When war reaches the city, the girl’s family is forced to leave earlier than planned. In the chaos of evacuation at the railway station, she loses her dog. The boy finds it and takes it with him as his own family escapes the burning city.

Decades later, now an old man, he returns to Sokhumi. In the ruins of his former home, memory and reality begin to overlap. The city of his childhood reappears in fragments, and once again we see the boy on his bicycle, disappearing into the sunlight of a vanished summer.