Combines arthouse sensitivities, historical gravitas and good ol' action setpieces to highly satisfying results.

Gigineishvili effectively translated this story into a taut thriller that never cheapened or exploited its subjects for cheap emotional moments or generic cinematic analogies.

Sometimes true and cautionary tales have deadly consequences, or so that's what Rezo Gigineishvili's film based on such true events about a group of young people from Georgia wanting to leave the Soviet Union portrays. The film captures the genuine authenticity of early 80s period sense along with a talented cast that makes these characters stand out it's almost hard to believe they're based on real people. Most of the time however, I found the film meandering when building up it's drama before anything else within the plot escalated. Nonetheless, this is a film that lives up to being based on true events I never would have known about and as shocking as the impacts are within the film's most thrilling sequences so is the overall subject matter at hand. By the end viewers will be conflicted as well as compelled and challenged when looking back as such devastating communist times.