Holy Trinity Cathedral, known in Georgian as Sameba, rises from a hill on the left bank of the Kura and is visible from almost anywhere in Tbilisi. Begun in the 1990s and consecrated in 2004, it was conceived and largely funded as a national project at a moment when Georgia was emerging from Soviet rule and reconstructing its public identity around the Orthodox Church. The architecture draws deliberately on the vocabulary of medieval Georgian building - the stepped mass, the tall drum, the pyramidal roofline - but at a scale no medieval workshop attempted, with a gilded dome, a broad terraced platform and subsidiary chapels below the main church. The film treats the cathedral as contemporary architecture with historical intent, following the liturgy, the chant and the movement of worshippers through the interior, and using aerial photography to place the building within the city it was designed to dominate. It is a portrait of a monument barely a generation old that already functions as a symbol.
