Actually, there were three of us directing the film. Tamuna Karumidzem, Salome and me. Salome will lead you through the whole process of shooting better than me.
Salome: When I first saw the photos of the skaters by David, I thought they were amazing and that they had much more to tell also cinematographically. I thought these photos had one more layer that is a space, an environment where skating took place. What I saw in the images was literally the celebration of youth and boyhood. The pictures depict the dreams, beauty of life, sexuality, nudity and rebellion in undefined and half ruined locations, so this inspired me to show the whole scenery. Apart from this, as I’ve been living myself for 20 years in Berlin and together with David for 8 years already, I always wanted to direct a movie about my country throughout this whole period. But it was kind of hard for me to find a form in which I could showcase Georgia the way it really is and we achieved to portray this reality through the eyes of the skater boys by documenting their passion. I was concentrated more on the plot while David took care of the visual stuff. Then Tamuna joined us, with whom I have worked on several other projects and we started directing the movie all together. Thanks to a great support of our German producer Jorg Langlkau, we managed to form a professional crew and started filming the boys with three different cameras in order not to miss a single thing they did. Besides the skaters, we wanted to show Tbilisi in a different way as it is a very eclectic, romantic and weird city, all at once. After we edited the film we planned to present it in Georgian cinemas, but the producer of the film, Zaza Rusadze, thought we could make more of it. His vision and great effort brought our film at IDFA Documentary Festival in Amsterdam. The film won IDFA award for the best first appearance, which was a great success – not only for us as directors but for the skaters also, their families and the whole country. We think that the main reason for this great international success is that the film does not showcase the life of young people from a narrow perspective as dreams, hobbies, interests and problems of the teenagers are almost the same everywhere in the world.