Salt for Svanetia review – poetic, dreamlike Soviet documentary of forgotten world

Mikhail Kalatozov's 1930s film gives a fascinating account of a medieval-style society about the supposed blessings of the USSR's modernising impact

In 1930, just as Luis Bunuel was releasing his classic L'Age d'Or, the Georgian director Mikhail Kalatozov gave us the 55-minute silent movie Salt for Svanetia, an equally rich, strange and mysterious work of ethno-fantasy and social-surrealist reverie. It is theoretically a documentary about the blessings which Soviet modernisation brought to the remote community of Ushguli in the Svanetia province of north-west Georgia; it contains a people governed by tribal traditions going back to the middle ages. Working with editor and formalist literary critic Viktor Shklovsky, and inspired by a magazine article by the writer Sergei Tretyakov, Kalatozov appears to have been initially undecided whether his film set in Svanetia would be fact or fiction. He settled - ostensibly - on the former.

The fundamental idea is that Svanetia's people are on the brink of starvation because they have no salt, which their cattle need to lick to get vital mineral nutrients. They are surrounded by impassable mountains and glaciers so little or no salt can be brought in. Cattle have to lick the sweat from other animals or humans - one of many bizarre closeup vignettes - or from urine, or even blood. Clearly, a road built with Bolshevik industry will help them.