Letters to Max

Paris, June 29 th 2012
Dear Max,
Are you there?
Éric

Abkhazia is something of a paradox: a country that exists, in the physical sense of the word (a territory with
borders, a government, a flag and a language), yet it has no legal existence because for almost twenty years it
was not recognized by any other nation state. Which is why Éric Baudelaire’s letter to his friend Maxim Gvinjia,
the former Foreign Minister of Abkhazia, was something of a message in a bottle thrown at sea. But the letter
arrived, and somehow fiction penetrated the real.
Thus began a letter writing campaign, 74 letters sent over 74 days, a script for a voiceover to a film in which Max
becomes the narrator. The film is structured by this exchange: letters that should not have arrived and yet
somehow reached Max, his recorded responses, and images that Éric Baudelaire filmed in Abkhazia once their
correspondence ended.