DOM - means house in Russ­ian. How­ev­er, it will not be a home for those who have found shel­ter here in Tbil­isi. They are young Russ­ian oppo­si­tion activists, jour­nal­ists and blog­gers who had to leave their coun­try due to the repression.

Now, they are sit­ting in their Dom, net­work­ing with friends, rel­a­tives, and oppo­nents of the regime in Russia, and dis­cussing the war and the next protest action against Putin in Tbil­isi. Yet, their activism only masks the grow­ing cer­tain­ty that there will be no return for them. And even in the city a graf­fi­ti warns: “Rus­sians, you are not wel­come in Georgia”.

With their film, Svet­lana Rodina and Lau­rent Stoop offer an insight into a side of the war that is rarely seen in West­ern media. It’s 2022, and a lost gen­er­a­tion is search­ing for its path, some find an apart­ment, others travel on. But where to?

SVETLANA RODINA, born in 1975 in Russia, grad­u­at­ed in Russ­ian lit­er­a­ture, philol­o­gy and film direct­ing in Moscow. In 2015, she com­plet­ed a master’s degree in film direct­ing at the Moscow Film School. A screen­writer and direc­tor of doc­u­men­taries, she has also worked as a host for var­i­ous tele­vi­sion pro­grammes. OSTROV (2021) won Best Inter­na­tion­al Fea­ture Doc­u­men­tary at Hot Docs in Toronto.

LAURENT STOOP, born in 1965 in Lau­sanne, Switzer­land, holds a degree in Lit­er­a­ture from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Geneva and a pho­tog­ra­phy diplo­ma from CEEP in Vevey. In 1995, he found­ed Mayak-Film in Moscow and began an inten­sive col­lab­o­ra­tion with Swiss tele­vi­sion, ARD, ZDF and France 2. As a DOP, he has shot var­i­ous tele­vi­sion and polit­i­cal doc­u­men­taries, includ­ing the award-win­ning and crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed CITIZEN KHODORKOVSKY (2016).