Negative Numbers

Negative Numbers by Uta Beria is a heart-felt, character-driven prison film focusing on a rugby program in a juvenile detention centre. It was recently shown at the Tbilisi International Film Festival and is slightly reminiscent of Tony Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner which is also about sport in a "reform school" and was also screened at the festival. For obscure political reasons a riot is being planned and the head boy Nika, who rules his fellow inmates through a combination of good looks, courage and the support of the prison authorities, has to navigate between competing loyalties. This kind of edgy, realistic, cinema verité, in which "you are there", is extremely effective at documenting exotic settings and conveying tension. The only problem is that, inevitably, prison movies have a lot of characters (in this case with foreign sounding names) and if there's a complicated story-line, viewers may have trouble keeping track of all the details. All of which means you might want to watch this thoughtful film a second time to get even more out of it.