Quotes of the Day

The time: late last year. The scene: the Pankisi Valley, a lawless corner of Georgia just over the mountains from Chechnya that is a safe haven for drug dealers, kidnappers, Chechen guerrillas and, if U.S. officials are right, a small number of al-Qaeda operatives. A Russian military jeep drives up a narrow, winding track and is ambushed by bearded gunmen. In the resulting firefight, one of the attackers is killed.

Such skirmishes happen almost daily in Chechnya, where Russia is fighting a war against separatist guerrillas. Just last week Chechen rebels shot down a Russian helicopter in neighboring Ingushetia, after reportedly entering the area from Georgia. But this particular scene is part of Marsho (Freedom), the first-ever Chechen feature film, shot on a $14,000 budget, with a mixture of Chechen and Georgian actors, a minimum of official permission and the tacit consent of local guerrillas.

During last winter's filming, Pankisi was a little-known backwater where no Georgian policeman dared tread. Now it is the center of an ominous dispute between the Kremlin and Georgia, as Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze struggles to hold together his crumbling, corruption-ridden state in the face of pressure from Vladimir Putin, whose policy is informed by a mixture of geopolitical frustration and personal animosity.

Putin's demands that Russians troops "restore order" in the Pankisi have been rejected by the Georgians, who point out that tens of thousands of Russians troops haven't managed to do this in over three years of war in Chechnya. What the Russians really want is to reimpose some degree of control over Georgia, whose strategic location was recently underlined by its agreement with Turkey and Azerbaijan to build an oil pipeline to the West that completely bypasses Russia.

When the film's director and male lead, Murad Mazayev, a 25-year-old exile from the Chechen capital of Grozny, was filming in Pankisi, his main concerns were squaring the local mafiosi and allaying the fears of his actresses. His 35-minute feature aims to tell the story of the second Chechnya war through one family. The oldest son, Mikail, doesn't fall into the usual Chechen warrior stereotype — the film hints at a love of drawing — but nonetheless leaves his village, family and fiancé and joins a guerrilla unit when the Russians invade in 1999. He is fatally wounded in a minor skirmish. When he dies, his younger brother is seen taking up Mikail's rifle to continue the fight. The message is simple, Mazayev says: "By killing one generation, the Russians are breeding a new generation with even more reason to fight."

Pankisi's reputation made everyone involved with the production nervous. "My parents will never allow me to go there," the Georgian female lead, Nata Gulyashvili, kept telling Mazayev as they rehearsed in Tbilisi. They eventually agreed that she wouldn't tell her family they were shooting in Pankisi. Mazayev obtained the blessing of the local Chechen guerrilla commander, Ruslan Gelayev, and fighters sometimes hovered on the fringes of the set. One became so smitten with Gulyashvili that he requested Mazayev's permission to speak to her. Mazayev politely fended him off.

More sinister figures, probably local gangsters, watched from a distance but didn't interfere. Word had gone out from Gelayev that the crew was to be left alone. Gelayev and some 300 men reportedly slipped out of the valley over a month ago and are now probably on the Georgian-Chechen border, waiting either for a chance to slip across or, as Georgian security officials maintain, negotiating with corrupt Russian army commanders to buy a safe corridor into Chechnya.

Marsho is Mazayev's first feature film. Since leaving Grozny six years ago, he has had little contact with his family, but says that his elder brother is slowly recovering from his time in one of the Russian "filtration camps" — brutal improvised prisons where, human rights groups say, torture, abuse and extrajudicial killings are common. Funding for Marsho came in part through Akhmed Zakayev, before the war a theater director and now principal deputy to the guerrillas' titular leader, Aslan Maskhadov. Other money, Mazayev says, came from charities in Turkey, which has been sympathetic to the Chechen cause.

If all goes well the film will premiere in Tbilisi in the fall. Vanessa Redgrave, the Oscar-winning actress and political activist, has said that she will try to attend. After that, Mazayev says hopefully, will come one of the big film festivals, perhaps in France or Berlin — places far removed, in every conceivable way, from the harsh, violent place that gave birth to this film.

• PAUL QUINN-JUDGE/Tbilisi
• Chechnya's first feature film gives new meaning to the term "shot on location"