What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?

This Berlinale FIPRESCI Prize winner is a romantic, Kafkaesque fable full of poignant whimsy and playful imagery.

One summer afternoon, Lisa and Giorgi bump into each other in the street. It’s love at first sight, but they part ways – only to cross paths again, almost immediately. When they run into each other for a third time, they decide to go on a date. Unfortunately for the pair, they are cursed; on the morning of their big day, both wake up having transformed into someone else. But even with new faces and new lives, Lisa and Giorgi still yearn for one another.

As he follows the couple’s journey towards reunification, writer/director Alexandre Koberidze also takes viewers on a leisurely and wittily self-aware detour through daily life in the historic Georgian city of Kutaisi, whose human, canine and inanimate-object populations are in the grip of World Cup fever. Saturated in colour thanks to Faraz Fesharaki’s artful mix of 16mm and digital cinematography, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? is an expansive, eloquent love letter to romance, to the mundane and the magical, and to the art of cinema itself.

“Alexandre Koberidze’s joyously elusive flight of fancy … is a slyly inventive, free-ranging adventure in cinematic possibility.” – Screen Daily