Nickoloz Kachibaia GCA and CSC Associate Member will tell you, without much ceremony, that a camera saved his life. He was born in Tbilisi and left at seven, when Georgia’s civil war made staying too dangerous, moving to Canada with his parents. Those first years in Canada were rough on him, and by his own account he was drifting toward a version of his teenage years he isn’t especially proud of. Then, around fourteen or fifteen, growing up in Toronto, he watched Ron Fricke’s Baraka — and something in it just lit up. It wasn’t only that the film was beautiful; it redirected him, gave him somewhere to point all that restlessness, and planted the idea that he could make something that might do for someone else what that film had just done for him. He made his first short film — a PSA about feeding homeless people in Toronto — at sixteen, and never really stopped.
What follows from there isn’t a tidy film-school success story, and Nickoloz is refreshingly upfront about that. He dropped out of university to join a program called Actuality Media, parachuting into another country to make a documentary for an NGO instead of finishing his degree. He shot events and stills, drifted into commercials, spent years cutting his teeth in Toronto’s ad world, and only later slid into narrative work. “I took a very long way to get where I am,” he says, and he means it as neither complaint nor humblebrag — just an honest map of a career built by wandering toward whatever pulled at him, rather than following a syllabus.
The pull, it turns out, runs both ways — toward the camera, and back toward Georgia. What strikes you talking to him about those early years in Tbilisi is how little they sound like a war. He remembers a house always full of guests, food constantly being shared, family gathered close and protecting him from whatever was happening outside. It didn’t feel dangerous from the inside — it felt communal, warm, and enveloped. Canada, by contrast, was suddenly just his mother and father, and that shift was disorienting in a way the war itself never was for him as a child. He’ll tell you flatly that this shaped his eye. The images that move him most are underexposed, a little dark, a little cerebral, dense even in daylight. He traces that directly back to the isolation of those Toronto years, scrambling for a sense of belonging with no other Georgians around to anchor him. It’s a rare thing, hearing a cinematographer draw such a clean, unforced line between a specific feeling and a specific aesthetic.
He moved back to Tbilisi in 2021, half-expecting nothing in particular, and instead had one of those nights that sound made up until someone tells them to you in person: overwhelmed to the point of not understanding what was happening to him, and then waking up the next morning knowing, immediately, that he was home. Every trip back from Toronto on a job had felt like travel. This felt like arrival. He talks about Georgian sets with real affection — everybody knows everybody, rival DPs wander over mid-shoot just to hang out, there’s
barely a visible hierarchy on set. Compared to the more highly productive rhythm of Canadian and American production, he finds it disarmingly warm, even if it moves differently.
The bulk of Nickoloz’s recent work sits inside a genuinely massive undertaking: The Eternal Song, the flagship film of a thirteen-country documentary series from SAND (Science and Non-Duality) — the same team behind The Wisdom of Trauma, made with contributions from Gabor Maté around intergenerational and collective trauma in indigenous communities. Two years, four continents, thirteen countries, twelve separate films plus the anchor feature. He shot most of it solo-camera on an Alexa with a rehoused Zeiss Contax set, frequently on a gimbal, and the process taught him something he clearly still carries: you cannot prep your way into an indigenous ritual you’ve never seen and don’t know if you’ll be allowed to film. So the prep became something else entirely — arriving, walking the space alone a couple of times, letting the angles and the light suggest themselves, then trusting whatever pulls his attention. He describes finding a shot the way you’d describe following a scent: start on something small, an instrument, a pair of hands, and let an eight-minute take wander wherever curiosity takes it, dead space and all. It’s a philosophy that would terrify a lot of commercial DPs and it clearly delights him.
That instinct-over-blueprint approach doesn’t mean he’s allergic to planning — quite the opposite on narrative and commercial jobs, where he’s taught himself Blender just to previz shots and hand directors something closer to the real thing than a mood board. He calls himself, half-joking, “the most anti-tech tech person there is” — genuinely drawn to older methods but perfectly willing to adopt new tools when they save time or sharpen the visual language, while remaining unmoved, so far, by anything fully AI-generated. Useful in prep, invisible in the images that actually land for him.
Ask him what part of the job he’d do forever if he only got to keep one, and after some hedging between camera movement and light, light wins. He’ll admit to occasionally wanting to run straight home from set and throw the footage into Resolve before it even reaches post, just to see what a grade pulls out of it. It tracks with everything else he says about the job: for him cinematography is less a technical discipline than an attempt to transmit the emotional temperature of a moment through tone, color and composition — and on documentary work specifically, to let your own eyes become the camera and simply flow through a scene rather than dictate it.
His advice to his younger self is almost embarrassingly simple, and probably worth more than most of what film school would have charged him for: stop being afraid of inconveniencing people, and just ask working cinematographers if you can shadow them. He waited years to do it out of shyness, eventually reached out to DPs he admired — Phedon Papamichael among them — and found people startlingly generous with their time. He reckons he learned more from a few days standing next to someone on set than from anything film school or YouTube ever taught him.
With two CSC nominations in hand — documentary and narrative in the same year, a genuinely unusual split — Nickoloz’s next stretch looks like more of the same restless duality: a narrative short back in Georgia with the same director who got him nominated, a possible continuation of the SAND documentary series, and a personal project close to his chest — a film about Georgia itself, made with a fellow Georgian filmmaker who spent twenty years in the US before coming home, in the same spirit as The Eternal Song. Given how much of his story already runs through the question of where home is, it feels less like a new direction than the one he keeps returning to.
