July

Third Cinema Days

Established in Tbilisi, Georgia, Third Cinema Days is an alternative, radical film festival and programme series dedicated to postcolonial cinema and voices from the Global South. We curate films that center resistance, identity, and storytelling beyond dominant narratives. More than just screenings, the festival functions as an assembly—transforming the cinema into a space for collective political engagement, critical dialogue, and reflection.

We present a selection based around themes of land, displacement, infrastructure as a means to exclude people and commodify land, alienation, and the constructed dichotomy of rural versus urban. With our programme we are attempting to situate the Caucasus region within wider West Asia and draw parallels, linking cultures under erasure and using connection as a way to build solidarity. 

In Georgia, the political landscape has ossified into a restrictive binary: the state opposes EU accession while tightening control on social freedoms, while the dominant opposition is uncritically “pro-Western,” heralding a “European future” that sterilises Georgian and Caucasus history. This discourse whitewashes our complex past, excising the Soviet legacy—from its divisive nationality policies to its aborted attempts at Second-Third World cultural solidarity—in favour of a flattened Western identity. We believe this polarisation creates a blind spot, dismissing local, regional, and inter-ethnic connections while ignoring the encroaching neo-capitalism of regional powers like Russia and Turkey. 

With this programme, we aim to provide nuance, resisting both uncritical Euro-Atlanticism and the erasure of our history. Through film, we seek to deconstruct contemporary myths centering Fortress Europe and ethnocentric nationalisms, using our shared context as a tool for oppressed peoples to build genuine solidarity.