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Rating: “Potatoes are money for us. Euros, dollars, Georgian lari: potatoes are everything”.
The merchant (sovdagari) is a documentary available on Netflix directed by Georgian filmmaker Tamta Gabrichidze, a snapshot of the life of Gela Kolochovi, a merchant from Tbilisi who travels from the capital into the Georgian countryside, crossing villages to offer his goods to the inhabitants of those areas.
In exchange, he doesn't ask for money; there's little lari circulating due to the poverty. Instead, he trades for potatoes. Clothes, tools, shoes, boots, toys are sold by the kilo of potatoes, the only true source of wealth (if we can call it that) for those people.
The mid-length film (about 20 minutes long) does not represent the banal fairy tale of happy simplicity, of appreciating what you have, or giving up material goods to appreciate life's meaning. More simply, Tamta Gabrichidze wants to denounce, through Gela's trade, the terrible poverty that many of his compatriots endure, those who live secluded in their suburbs far both physically and economically from the capital.
“My dream as a child was to get an education. I wanted to graduate from university, but I couldn't because I never had the opportunity”.
These are the words of an old villager, interviewed by the director. Legitimate aspirations, even taken for granted for most of us living in the affluent Western world, but which become a utopia for someone destined to spend the rest of his life among potato fields.
“And what is your dream now? My dream? Just to have a good harvest. To have a good job, a harvest, and not to stay idle at home”.
This documentary teaches us that, much more simply, poverty is a cage, a white life sentence for which it is almost impossible to obtain clemency. A prison entered as children, whose life flows gloomy as the gray and wintery climate depicted by the film, for whom even the simple sight of a colorful sponge, a notebook, or a women's handbag becomes a reason for wonder, a desire to play. Children who, when asked "what do you want to be when you grow up," cannot find an answer because they probably can't imagine a different life, and who will be forced to beg for a grater when they are old because they have only one lari and not the five kilos of potatoes required to afford it.
The director Tamta Gabrichidze is Georgian and wanted to show us part of his country, but can we truly believe this happens only in Georgia? More likely, these stories are much more frequent, much closer to us than we might believe. Social injustices, the division of the population into classes - if not into real castes, but in the sense of Indian culture, without invoking modern politicians - create life situations from which it's difficult to escape, where the potato farmer's child will be a potato farmer, and the unemployed suburbaner's child will have to strive to redeem himself, and so on.
At the end of the day, Gela the merchant returns to his Tbilisi to sell the potatoes, gaining the necessary earnings for himself and to buy more goods to offer again to the villages of Georgia. The cunning and ingenuity of the merchant, who has found his source of livelihood in potatoes.
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