
Abkhazia - Valley Of The Lost
In the summer of 2008, while the world watches Russian tanks roll into South Ossetia, a second Georgian breakaway region falls almost unnoticed: Abkhazia. Reporter Aidan Hartley and director Alex Nott travel to the Kodori Gorge, the last Georgian-held pocket of Abkhazian territory, high in the Caucasus mountains, after hearing reports of fighting there. Turned back repeatedly at militia checkpoints, they eventually talk their way onto a government-organized helicopter flight carrying mostly Russian journalists into the valley. What they find is a population in flight: Georgian civilians who have abandoned homes and farms ahead of the advancing Abkhazian and Russian forces, and local officials who offer Hartley conflicting, evasive accounts of what actually happened there. The film sets this quieter, less-reported takeover against the headline war in South Ossetia, showing how a second territory changed hands in the same season with almost no outside scrutiny. It is a short, on-the-ground account of displacement and contested claims rather than a full history of the conflict.