(Thu 16th / 6:30 pm and 8:30pm / £4/3 single film, £5/4 double bill)

THE LEGEND OF SURAM FORTRESS
(Sergo Paradjanov & Dodo Abashidze / Georgia / 1984 / 87mins)

Medieval warriors building a fortress are told that in order to make it impregnable a young boy must be walled up alive. After a decade of imprisonment the dissident visionary Paradjanov returned to his homeland with this folk tale of courtly surrealism, mixing sumptuous and bizarre tableaux, oriental theatre, puppets, toys, optical distortions, deliberate anachronisms and a rich stew of ritual and magic.

BRIGANDS
(Otar Iosseliani / Georgia / 1996 / 129mins)

By now Georgia's greatest living director, Iosseliani returned to Georgia after years abroad with this hugely ambitious triple-layered epic in which the same cast appear in alternating stories from the barbaric medieval kingdom, the tortuous insanity of the Stalin era and the corruption of the modern-day international arms mafia to illustrate the ever-returning cycles of violence and stupidity that plague history.