OSTPOL BERLIN Festival
5.—12. Juli 2026

The father, a writer, is slowly losing his ability to speak. His daughter Stella, on the other hand, is constantly playing with words. Her mother, Marika, always has to find a solution to every problem. As they set off for a child’s birthday party on the other side of town, they come across a second story set in an old Soviet-era high-rise. Cut off from the outside world by electric fences and barred windows, the residents are visibly suffocating in their own rubbish. Fugitive generals and escaped zoo animals haunt the corridors, and for some time now the children have been disappearing. Can humanity be saved, or will it wipe itself out? What is the point of telling stories, of hoping, if in the end all our creations merely add to the rubbish? Zoorama is a literary quest for the means of survival in a world that has been thrown into disarray.

»To me, Zoorama is like a labyrinth that one traverses breathlessly, as if it were impossible to pause or even turn back. Much like Dante’s Virgil, the author’s alter ego guides us unerringly through his own personal Inferno. He leads us through the grubby, grey streets of Berlin, into a fragmented Tbilisi – which, for him, now consists solely of set pieces – and into an apocalyptic high-rise block with its bizarre, doomed inhabitants.« Nino Haratischwili

»Today, many Eastern Europeans are once again being forced to flee to the West, into exile, out of fear. One such refugee is Zaza Burchuladze. […] Yet the country one takes with them into exile is no bigger than the soles of one’s feet and the grief in one’s mind.« Herta Müller

»Zaza Burchuladze is a distinctive, original writer who is unlike any other. His prose has an element of unpredictability about it – the most important hallmark of quality for a contemporary author.« Wladimir Sorokin