Dear Friends,

This year has seen a number of interesting visitors to Pankisi Valley and Nazy’s Guest House. Among  our guests this year was a Japanese television film crew that came to film Pankisi Valley, Kist people and their culture as part of a travel film promoting Georgia to Japanese people. The filming in Pankisi was done over a week during September. We worked closely with the co-ordinator Yujiro Watanabe to advise and assist him, the film director and his team.

The film crew worked very hard from morning to late evening and were very polite and professional. We were informed the film was shown in October 2014 to a large Japanese television audience and it was received very enthusiastically. Subsequently, we started to get emails from people in Japan saying how much they liked the valley and guest house and would like to visit.

Yoichi Watanabe is a Japanese photographer and the film follows his footsteps when he visited Pankisi valley in 2005 and 2009. He was deeply moved by the people he met and places he visited and wanted to return to see what had changed and document the life of a peaceful community still unfortunately perceived by the west and the wider world as a dangerous place.

My family and community would like to thank Yoichi Watanabe, Hirotoshi Takeoka the director and his crew, and Yujiro Watanabe for coordinating, for creating awareness of Georgia, Pankisi valley and Kist/Chechen people.