Objave
Press Conference With the Crew of the Film SUPPORTING ROLE: What Happens When Life Takes Away the Main Role?
Five years after winning the Heart of Sarajevo Award with her debut film “Scary Mother”, Georgian director Ana Urushadze returned to the Sarajevo Film Festival. Her new film SUPPORTING ROLE will have its regional premiere tonight in the Competition Programme – Narrative Feature Film, after winning an award at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam.
While her previous work followed the inner transformation of a woman, in her new project Urushadze shifts the theme to a man. The plot centers around Niaz Ninua, a former star actor, who is trying to return to the stage after a fifteen-year absence. However, his return is not as he had imagined.
At the audition for the young director’s debut work, he was offered the role of an older, bizarre, and extremely unsympathetic man. It is a character opposite to the heroic roles he used to play. Niaz is offended by this suggestion and convinced that such a character has nothing to do with him. However, as time passes, he begins to return to that encounter and discovers something completely unexpected in the task he initially rejected.
Although the original plan was for someone else to play the lead role, Urushadze changed her mind as the project developed. Dato Bakhtadze was chosen for the lead role. The crew members later joked that Dato simply “took over” the entire project as soon as filming began.
Bakhtadze admitted at a press conference that he accepted the role intuitively. He said that acting came naturally to him, and the collaboration with Urushadze was excellent. Although the first week of rehearsals was intense, the process quickly became easier. “Acting is best when I don’t feel like I’m acting,” Bakhtadze said.
It was this naturalness that was key to the young director’s vision. Niaz is a man torn between his own self-image and the reality that has overtaken him. Accustomed to the attention and status of a hero, he now has to decide what it means for him to accept a place in the background.
Hence the title of the project. Supporting Role not only denotes Niaz’s acting task, but also his place in life and the film industry. The story shows how a man deals with aging, ego and the changing world around him, moving between humor and melancholy. The original music for the film was composed by Estonian author Sten Sheripov, and the director emphasized how important this background was for the overall atmosphere.
Supporting Role was created as an international co-production of five countries. Interestingly, this work has been associated with Sarajevo since 2020, when it won the Development Award at the CineLink Co-Production Market, and was then presented in the CineLink Work in Progress programme in 2024.