Then, in 2013, a Georgian TV station acquired rights to a censored version of A Serbian Film for a late-night slot. But by mistake—or perhaps by a tired intern’s autocorrect—the station’s server loaded Nikoloz’s Qartulad subtitles instead of the official Russian translation. For three nights, the film aired, complete with Nikoloz’s warning preface. Ratings were low, but the damage was done. A conservative journalist discovered the error and wrote a furious column: “Satanic Serbian propaganda shown to Georgian children.” The station apologized, pulled the film, and purged the files.
For two years, Qartulad existed only on burned DVDs and USB drives passed between Tbilisi’s underground cinephiles. It screened once in a basement art space near Marjanishvili Square. Only twelve people attended. One walked out. The rest stayed, silent, and afterwards debated for hours whether art could justify such images.
Nikoloz had studied film in Tbilisi and later in Prague. He was fascinated by extreme cinema as a form of political expression. A Serbian Film , for all its grotesque violence, was born from the director’s rage at censorship and exploitation in post-war Serbia. Nikoloz believed Georgian audiences—who had lived through civil war, economic collapse, and media manipulation in the 1990s—might understand the metaphor beneath the mayhem.
