Rezo Gabriadze
A poet who expresses himself in various ways, Rezo Gabriadze writes, draws, sculpts, builds, paints, and creates the characters and stories he directs in the theatre he founded in 1981 in Tbilisi, Georgia. After working as a journalist, he began his career in cinema “by accident,” but soon found himself directing his own films. Up until the 1990s, he also wrote many screenplays for films which met with great success in the USSR, notably Mimino and Kin-dza-dza! According to him, it's also “by accident” that he picked up puppetry, becoming a master of the art with The Autumn of our Springtime in 1985. Next to his theatre, characters, sets, and other creations fill a wondrous tower which illustrates his relationship to the world: in his work, inanimate objects aren't necessarily deprived of souls, and the past and the present keep crossing in always delicate ways, sometimes with extravagance and often with humour. Recognised throughout the world for the enchanting way he uses his childhood and his ties to Soviet Russia in his work, Rezo Gabriadze now returns to the Festival d'Avignon twenty years after The Song of the Volga.
