Their Helicopter

September 6, 2023 5:56 AM

"This is a gentle and slightly absurdist documentary about the Ardoteli family in the mountains of Georgia who discovered that a Chechen helicopter carrying cheese had crashed by their house. Dropped into the life of this family, a helicopter is gradually enfolded into their daily rhythms, transformed into something utterly unexpected. In this land free of electric cables, cows find a shelter and children set up their private playground in it. Patient observations through the rusted “eyes” of this helicopter unfold a story of a remote place exposed to just one piece of civilization." (22 mins, 2006)

More documentaries by Salomé Jashi, "documentary filmmaker, videomaker in quest of subversive elements of life".

Some of her work is available for free

Financial pyramids have been a consistent feature in Georgia’s recent history. State banks, private lenders and construction companies have all taken money from people with the promise of future profit. But in most cases, the money has simply disappeared. The film shows the latest cycle of financial naivety–as well as society’s desperate attempts to earn money fast, even if very strange methods were needed. The film was shot in Javakheti, a southern region of Georgia on the border with Armenia and Turkey that is mostly populated by ethnic Armenians. (A Crypto Rush Aftermath, 2023)

and some not yet, but seems to worth checking out

The opening shot of filmmaker Salomé Jashi’s striking environmental tale captures a tree as tall as a 15-story building floating on a barge across the vast Black Sea. Its destination lies within a garden countless miles away, privately owned by a wealthy and anonymous man whose passion resides in the removal, and subsequent replanting, of foreign trees into his own man-made Eden.

With astonishing cinematic style,Taming the Garden tracks the surreal uprooting of ancient trees from their Georgian locales. With each removal, tensions flare between workers and villagers. Some see financial incentives—new roads, handsome fees—while others angrily mourn the loss of what was assumed an immovable monolith of their town’s collective history and memory. With a steady and shrewdly observant eye, Jashi documents a single man’s power over Earth’s natural gardens: how majestic living artifacts of a country’s identity can so effortlessly become uprooted by individuals with no connection to the nature they now claim as their own. (Taming the Garden, 2021)

posted by kmt (10 comments total)

(Forgot to add the via part, when my jaw dropped at 'Taming the Garden', sorry about that! He actually links to this documentary, this is how I found it.)
posted by kmt at 7:06 AM on September 6, 2023

How much cheese?
posted by RobotHero at 7:37 AM on September 6, 2023 [16 favorites]

Looks like the shell of a Mi-8MSB. This should be the immediate fate of all military equipment; reused to haul cheese, then become a hill side barn and then eventually a guest house for itinerant hipsters.
posted by zenon at 8:16 AM on September 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

How much cheese?

Fully loaded, a Mi-8 could carry about 4 tonnes of cheese.

It's unclear what happened to the cheese, but I'm guessing the entire valley smelled of cheese farts for several months after the crash.
posted by automatronic at 8:19 AM on September 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

hands up if you grew up around discarded farm equipment in random places and it became your (tie fighter/tank/spaceship) on the regular

hell, for one glorious summer it was my friend's parents' old maroon Ford Grenada and we bumped our heads sooo many times doing our best impression of a Duke Boys entry (believe me, we were way too young and way too Nova Scotian to know what the Stars and Bars were all about)
posted by elkevelvet at 8:57 AM on September 6, 2023 [11 favorites]

This sounds good and weird.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:05 AM on September 6, 2023

"Nobody died," at 1:24 mark (of 22:16 runtime), via YouTube. (I was worried about the pilot.)
Salomé Jashi channel

Thanks, kmt, it's a gorgeous film, and very sweet (the kids jostling the entire mattress, to rock the baby the sleep; the cows at the new 'copter gate, getting their scritch on; the doghouse; how the setting sun is going home, to its mum).
posted by Iris Gambol at 1:58 PM on September 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Fully loaded, a Mi-8 could carry about 4 tonnes of cheese.

I have trouble with metric units - how many quarts of fondue are we talking here?
posted by nickmark at 4:18 PM on September 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

4 metric fuck-tons of fondue. Enough fondue to keep the valley making little squares of bread for a long damned time.
posted by evilDoug at 9:05 PM on September 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Tonnes and tons are similar amounts. (Seems odd, in that light, that the namers of metric units didn't do the same with the metre and call it the yarde. But then it would have had to be the yardean system.)
posted by rory at 10:30 PM on September 6, 2023