George Barbakadze | The Bridge / 2005

love torn apart

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Barbakadze and Fleur Cooper (screenplay), George Barbakadze (director) The Bridge / 2005 [8 minutes]

 

Long before the current United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) attempts to rid the US of as many people of color without (and sometimes even with) citizenship as they can round up, ICE still created havoc with many families, particularly young couples not yet married who had arrived in the US to begin a new life, sometimes one being accepted for a green card while the other was rejected.

    One day, one of my best students came to me with just such a problem. He had fallen in love with a beautiful Swedish woman, but they weren’t yet ready for marriage, and despite his father’s governmental connections (he had been a US ambassador to several countries), Immigration had denied her permission to remain in the US any longer. “What should I do?” he asked.

    I was a strong believer in advanced education, convinced that without it capable young men and women would be strongly delimited in their futures. But his love for this woman seemed so powerful that I could only advise him to follow her back to Sweden. “After all, I said, you can always get an education a little later, but if you miss the woman you love, you may never find another like her.”

    He followed my advice, and today, living in Sweden, they are still married some 50 years later.

   Such problems were often were even more difficult (and probably in the US are now even worse, because they can marry) for gay men and women who couldn’t marry. After all, ICE had no interest in bringing queers into the good ole USA!

    Before same-sex marriage was permitted in most Western countries, these difficulties weren’t limited to the US, but occurred in nearly all nations, whose departments of immigration’s decisions of who could stay and who must leave seemed sometimes like a throw of the dice.

    Australian filmmaker George Barbakadze, in his short film The Bridge, tells of just such a couple, Luka (Glen Upton) and Niko (Andre Cunningham), young Georgian gay men who escaped from their homeland in response to its homophobic attitudes.

    Luka has arrived in Sydney first, followed by his friend. Perhaps because he is an architect, so it appears, he soon receives a letter announcing his permanent residency in his newly adopted country.

    The two begin enjoying their life together, Luka constructing his dream home for the two of them and Niko involved with his works of pottery. But one day Luka returns home to find Niko gone; he has received a rejection from the immigration authorities, and to save his lover and himself from a sad series of farewells, has decided to leave immediately leaving only a letter to explain his disappearance.

   The problem with this short work is that there is hardly any dialogue or even developed interplay between the two lovers. We know so little about them and their lives that the only thing we can be sure of is the film’s assurance of their love and the fact that they have been torn apart through governmental bureaucracy, which continues to sadden Luca for the rest of his life.

    This is an important issue, but to recognize the effects it has upon individuals who only seek to find a safe place in which to love one another, we first have to understand them and their love for one another, something that Barbakadze’s eight-minute work does not provide.

    Moreover, it would be interesting to know what happens to people like Niko who must return to a country not at all sympathetic to the reasons why he escaped. Was he arrested and put into prison or even worse?

    Although his director has taken on a truly troublesome and profound issue, he hasn’t done it any service by delimiting his tale to occasional languishing looks between the two men and the moody score by Alies Sluiter. We need to understand more about their lives, hear their voices, however accented they may be, and observe them showing the love we are led to believe exists between them. The old literary saw about showing instead of telling in this work is entirely appropriate. They need to show us more than their coming and going for us to understand how cruel these immigration departments often are in their generalized treatment of individual lives around the world.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).