The Witcher Bestiary Season 1, Part 2
2020 Movie
Overview
A refugee from Abkhazia, a separatist region of the Republic of Georgia which has declared independence, enlists in the Georgian army, passes though the training and becomes a professional soldier whose first vacation is interrupted by the war against Russia in Southern Osetia in 2008.
Reviews
5 min readThe Unseen War: A Soldier’s Face in "Unknown Soldiers"
I keep thinking about the way the camera lingers on his hands. Not in battle—there’s little of that here—but in the quiet moments before. A recruit peeling potatoes in a dim barracks, his fingers working mechanically, the knife glinting under the bare bulb.
The shot lasts just long enough for you to notice the callouses, the way his thumb presses too hard, as if he’s trying to carve something deeper than the skin of the vegetable. It’s the kind of detail that doesn’t announce itself, doesn’t scream for attention. And yet, in a documentary like Unknown Soldiers, where the absence of spectacle is the point, these are the images that stick.
Shalva Shengeli’s 2008 film is a rare thing: a war documentary that refuses to show war. There are no explosions, no sweeping drone shots of smoldering villages, no generals pontificating in front of maps. Instead, we get a single soldier—unnamed, like so many of the men who fill the ranks—whose life is interrupted by a conflict that isn’t even his to begin with.
He’s a refugee from Abkhazia, a separatist region of Georgia, and when the film opens, he’s just another recruit in the Georgian army, going through the motions of basic training. The war in South Ossetia, which will erupt in August of that year, is still a rumor, a distant thunder. By the time it arrives, he’s already a professional soldier, home on leave when the call comes.
His vacation ends. The war begins. And the film, in its stubborn, almost perverse restraint, follows him into it—not with the chaos of battle, but with the eerie stillness of waiting.
What does it mean to document a war without showing its violence? This is the question that haunts Unknown Soldiers, and it’s one Shengeli answers not with grand statements, but with silence. The film is shot in a stark, almost clinical style—long takes, static frames, a color palette drained of warmth.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsThey were filming leave. The war started instead.
TMDB dates Unknown Soldiers to August 8, 2008. That is not a festival premiere. That is the first morning of the Russo-Georgian war. The original title is Utsnobi jariskatsebi. Shalva Shengeli wrote and directed. The Georgian National Film Center's 2008 catalogue says the crew shot on DV Cam, color mixed with black and white, about 71 minutes. IMDb and the Institute of Documentary Film's DOKweb both list 61. latestnetflix.com's take is that A YouTube copy that has lived online since 2013 runs 57 minutes and 31 seconds.The cut was never the gossip. The calendar was.,,,
Shengeli had been following a professional army recruit named Dato Gurchiani, a refugee from Abkhazia who joined up to support his family. The catalogue says Gurchiani struggled with the rules, then passed, then earned his first leave. The leave never happened. Alarm. The boys went to war. Shengeli was born in 1966, trained as an architect, then as a director under Rezo Esadze. He had already made army films. Heavenly Knights. Brigade. Base #12. This is the one the war finished for him.
The YouTube description is blunt. The documentary was shot in the weeks before August and during the fighting itself. It is dedicated to the soldiers who died. Producers are Tinatin Kajrishvili and Giorgi Tskhvitava, working as Gemini and Vito out of Tbilisi. Music is by Niaz Diasamidze. Cinematography by Giorgi Sigua and Levan Kantidze. Shengeli edited with Kajrishvili.,
Half of them came home unnamed.
DOKweb's own synopsis is the rumor the film carries in public. When Georgian units could recover bodies from occupied ground, half were buried as unknown soldiers. "Some consider it was done to hide the real number of dead soldiers," the listing says, because the public line was that Georgia had won and lost few compared with Russia. The same text puts the three-day military death count at 175.
Civil.ge reported a real burial on August 28. Twenty-six unknown Georgian soldiers, killed in clashes with Russian troops and South Ossetian militiamen, were buried in Tbilisi. The South Ossetian side had handed over 43 bodies the night before. Defense minister Davit Kezerashvili said 20 Georgian soldiers were still missing. Official figures that week put Ministry of Defense dead at 183.
That is the story Netflix still hosts. A local crew followed one Abkhazian refugee through basic training, then had a war drop on the footage. IMDb gives the film one unnamed nomination and zero user reviews. The soldiers in the title are not a metaphor. They are the men Civil.ge watched go into the ground without names.,,
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.
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