Tangerines

Tangerines (Mandariinid, 2013), Zaza Urushadze's quiet anti-war drama, is available to watch online on iFILM. An Estonian village in the Caucasus has emptied out — almost everyone has gone back to the Baltic. Two old men stay: Ivo and Marcus, unwilling to abandon a ripe crop of tangerines.

It is the autumn of 1992, and the fighting in Abkhazia reaches Ivo's doorstep. A Georgian soldier and a Chechen mercenary fighting for the separatists shoot each other down right outside. Both survive, both end up wounded under the same roof, and Ivo extracts a single promise: while they heal in his house, they will not lay a hand on each other. What follows is an uneasy truce, sworn enemies forced to share a table day after day.

Lembit Ulfsak plays Ivo with almost no dialogue and somehow holds the entire film together. This Estonian-Georgian co-production became the first Estonian feature to compete for the foreign-language Oscar, and it reached the same category at the Golden Globes. A spare, deeply humane piece about how war loses its logic the moment your enemy has a face. Stream Tangerines (2013) online on iFILM.