This is the story of a small African village where people still live as they did millennia ago: hunting, fishing, and following their own rituals and peculiar laws. In their world, money, telephones, or politics do not exist.

But “civilization” intrudes upon this idyll. Loggers arrive with their massive saws and machinery to clear-cut the forest that is sacred to these people. Otar Iosseliani shows us that civilization is often not progress, but destruction. “And Then There Was Light” is Iosseliani’s attempt to capture those last islands of humanity where people remain in harmony with the world.