When I was eight, in the 1990s, my mother began hosting exchange students from across the former Soviet Union. Through them, I encountered a world largely inaccessible to me in the United States—one grappling with the collapse of a system that, for all its violence and constraints, had structured daily life. That early exposure led me to travel and study throughout the post-Soviet region, where I became fascinated by how Soviet legacies continue to shape not only infrastructure and economics, but memory and belonging.

In Tusheti, that legacy is deeply felt. Elders remember a time when Soviet support—schools, electricity, and winter provisions—made year-round life in the highlands possible. For many, its collapse marked not just political rupture, but the beginning of community unraveling, followed by isolation, out-migration, and the gradual erosion of ways of life sustained over centuries.

This story also resonates personally. Growing up, long backpacking trips with my grandfather in the remote Sierra Nevada taught me how mountain isolation can foster dense forms of community and intergenerational care—an understanding that shaped how I encountered Tusheti.

This film is an intimate collaboration between myself and my Georgian collaborator, Anna R. Japaridze. As documentarians, we are drawn to pockets of community and idiosyncrasy that remain vibrant in the present age of mass movement and capitalist globalization. These are not relics of a prior world or mirages from a ‘timeless’ past; they are of this time, reminding us that we can live in a multiplicity of ways and imagine futures grounded in alternative modes of life. Tusheti is one such place.

Yet, Tusheti is transforming. As village elders pass on, local youth migrate in pursuit of greater stability, placing centuries-old knowledge—passed down through oral tradition—at risk. While these changes unfold through the unique prism of Tusheti, they are globally relevant. Rural depopulation is occurring worldwide, and the increasing concentration of people in cities is leading many of us toward increasingly atomized lives—divorced from our heritage, estranged from our neighbors, and disconnected from the natural world.

-Robert Hope, director of Placekeepers