A Fiction Film Shot Inside Real Protests: 'Tear Gas' Heads to Locarno
A fiction feature shot inside live anti-government demonstrations in Tbilisi, Georgia, is set to world premiere on 12 August at the 79th Locarno Film Festival. The film, titled Tear Gas, took director Uta Beria five years to complete — five years during which the protests it documents have continued without interruption for more than 600 days (The Hollywood Reporter).
The film follows sixteen-year-old Elene in a Georgian refugee settlement, where a day of protest unfolds into a night of events (Marché du Film, Facebook). It screens in Locarno's Filmmakers of the Present competition, a section dedicated to emerging and boundary-pushing directors. The festival's own description opens with the line: "Tear gas is a weapon created to disperse us, tear us apart, make us cry..." (Locarno Film Festival).
The protests Beria filmed are real, and so is the tear gas. Police in Tbilisi regularly use it to break up demonstrations that began over fears Georgia is sliding toward an authoritarian model resembling Russia's rather than pursuing a Western-style democracy in NATO and the EU. At the centre of the unrest is a Foreign Agents Law nicknamed "the Russia law" by protesters, who see it as modelled on Russian legislation used to suppress civil society (The Hollywood Reporter).
Beria has said the Georgian National Film Center has adopted stricter rules about withholding funding from film-makers whose political views diverge from the government line, which he described as a form of censorship (The Hollywood Reporter). Tear Gas is a co-production of Georgia, France and Germany (Locarno Film Festival), produced by Nino Chichua, Anna Khazaradze and Beria, with co-producers Guillaume Dreyfus, Delphine Schmit, Daniel Tenné and Junus Baker. The cast includes Taisia Eradze, Mzia Arabuli, Gaga Shishinashvili, Kato Kalatozishvili and Boris Andronikashvili. Goga Devdariani served as cinematographer; Nodar Nozadze edited (The Hollywood Reporter).
Before reaching Locarno, the project collected two awards at the 2025 IFFR Pro industry section of the International Film Festival Rotterdam: the inaugural HBF Empowerment Award and the Outward Gaze Award from the PJLF Arts Fund, each worth 10,000 euros (The Hollywood Reporter). Beria's previous film, Negative Numbers, established him as a Georgian director willing to work at the intersection of sport and social tension.
Croatia-based sales company Split Screen has boarded the film for international sales ahead of the premiere (Screen Daily). For a film whose subject is still unfolding nightly on the streets of Tbilisi, finding a distributor is only one part of the journey — the harder question is whether a festival audience in Switzerland can sit with what a teenage character in a refugee settlement is living through in real time.
