A small war in the contested Black Sea state of Abkhazia is the backdrop to this gripping and focused chamber piece, which made the final five in the best foreign film category at this year's Oscars.
In the early 90s, as conflict rages in the Caucasus between Georgians and Russian-backed Abkhazi, the region's long-established ethnic Estonians have fled to a homeland they have never known. But stubbornly staying on are Margus (Nuganen), who does not want to desert his annual citrus crop, and his elderly neighbour Ivo (Ulfsak), a carpenter who always makes the crates for the title's fruit.
Theirs is the very model of a village friendship built on a time-honoured exchange of skills, but their world is being torn apart. Soon enough, the war lands, almost literally, on their doorstep, when a firefight delivers them a bunch of bodies and a wounded survivor from each side: Muslim Chechen mercenary Ahmed (Nakashidze) and the more gravely injured Niko (Meskhi), who's fighting for the Georgians. At the real risk of reprisal from roving militia, Ivo takes both men in, on condition that, while under his roof, they limit hostilities to glowering and growling.
There are absurdist flashes in the way matters develop, though not on the scale of Danis Tanovic's bleak and angry 2001 Oscar-winner No Man's Land. Much of the tension consists in wondering whether Urushadze, who wrote the economical screenplay, will seek to extract a glibly upbeat ending from the horror. In the event he responds creatively and, if the conventional last scene begs a few questions, the sudden denouement is both unexpected and dramatic.
There's a pointedly timeless feel to the film's design (only Ivo's circular saw and the weaponry date the story), which underlines the universality of its impelling idea about how, once we stop stripping the enemy of humanity, war becomes incomprehensible.
