synopsis

In the morning Abastumani looks just like an old hospital where patients stand in long queues waiting to be administered dozens of pills. In the afternoon the building transforms into a social centre where players gamble under clouds of cigarette smoke as patients kill time. At night after the doctors and staff go home, Abastumani becomes a dangerous place, where alcohol and drugs make patients violent.

Life is short in Abastumani and farewells are without tears. But when one of them is gone, patients gather in the priest’s room and pray with him under a wall of icons. This is when patients open up and share their deepest sins.

Life doesn’t change until one day news arrives that the building has been sold and will be demolished. The many rooms are emptied, mattresses piled high and only small artefacts of the patients remain as memories. The staff bids farewell to the building for the last time, the sanatorium that defined their lives. Each one is over retirement age and they know that without the building they will be nothing in the new era.

Big trucks and tractors patiently wait until the last person has left the historic building. Built as a royal summer residency in late 1800s, it became one of the most prestigious sanatoriums in the Soviet Union and finally it was a shelter for society’s rejects. A century of memories is turned into dust. But will the memory of 100 years disappear with this building?