The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity has shortlisted Birds Don’t Forget to Fly, a Georgia Independence Day film about the pursuit of freedom, in two of its most prestigious categories. The campaign’s director and its narrator are both serving prison sentences in Georgia for their roles in pro-European protests.
The campaign was built by the Georgian pharmacy chain PSP and the Tbilisi agency Playmakers, and lands in a final field of 18 campaigns competing for the Dan Wieden Titanium Lions, alongside entries from IKEA, Xbox, and Vaseline. The campaign itself runs as a single, spare visual story, set against Georgia’s Independence Day in 2025. PSP announced the shortlist on its own LinkedIn page on June 11, and Georgia Today reported it the next day. The festival’s closing ceremony on June 26 will name the winners in both categories.
The Shortlist
“Birds Don’t Forget to Fly” was built for Georgia’s Independence Day in 2025 and runs as a single, spare visual story: a girl who visits a market each day, buys caged birds, carries them into a forest, and sets them free. PSP, in its LinkedIn announcement, called Glass and Titanium “among the most exceptional categories” at Cannes Lions, reserved for work that stands out for creative excellence and for cultural and social impact.
Georgia Today reported the shortlist on June 12, writing that the campaign was shortlisted in two of the festival’s most prestigious categories. PSP framed the recognition as one of the most celebrated Georgian campaigns in the industry’s history. The full shortlist was published by industry tracker LLLLITL, which lists the PSP campaign on its Titanium roster.
The Glass shortlist size is not in the source materials. The Titanium shortlist is 18 of 137 entries.
By the numbers (Cannes Lions 2026):
- 8 main award tracks
- 1 standalone flagship: the Dan Wieden Titanium Lions
- Closing ceremony and Glass and Titanium award announcement: June 26
Two Creators, Two Sentences
The director, Giorgi Okmelashvili, is the founder of the Georgian advertising agency Limoni. He was arrested on May 15, 2024, two days after a protest near the Georgian Parliament against a draft law on foreign influence. Transparency International Georgia documented the criminal case in detail, and published a step-by-step analysis that flagged the speed of the investigation.
On February 3, 2025, a court in Tbilisi found Okmelashvili guilty under Article 353¹, Part 1 of the Criminal Code of Georgia, attacking a police officer, and sentenced him to 5 years in prison. A second charge of illegal purchase and possession of narcotic substances was dropped under the Law on Amnesty. The Transparency International Georgia analysis described a criminal case “investigated hastily, essentially in three days,” with 15 investigators running more than 60 procedural actions. The “victim” police officer reported the attack not immediately, but the next day, May 14.
The narrator, Andro Chichinadze, is a film and theatre actor from the New Theater in Tbilisi. He was arrested on December 5, 2024, during pro-European protests in the capital.
A Tbilisi court sentenced Chichinadze to 2 years in prison on charges of “disturbing public order.” Judge Nino Galustashvili presided. His supporters and several civil society representatives have described the case as politically motivated, referring to him as a “prisoner of conscience.”
FIA, the International Federation of Actors, has called publicly for Chichinadze’s release, and Amnesty International has run an urgent action on his behalf. The Cannes Lions shortlist lands a year after his arrest and inside the prison term that followed.
A Film Made to Be Free
The campaign was directed by Okmelashvili, with narration voiced by Chichinadze, and produced by PSP in cooperation with Playmakers. It runs as a single repeated visual sequence, the same girl, the same market, the same cage, the same forest, the same open door. The only consistent frame from one day to the next is the cage door closing behind her, until it doesn’t close. The film’s central line, voiced by Chichinadze, is that “the pursuit of freedom is as natural and inevitable for people as flight is for birds.”
Each caged bird bought, carried, and freed is the same visual grammar as each protester arrested and held. The credits, as Georgia Today listed them, put PSP and Playmakers on the production side and Okmelashvili and Chichinadze on the creative side. The campaign’s structure and credits are the same line-up of names that two courts have now sentenced.
- Client: PSP
- Agency: Playmakers
- Director: Giorgi Okmelashvili (serving 5 years)
- Narrator: Andro Chichinadze (serving 2 years)
- Launch: Georgia’s Independence Day 2025
- Cannes Lions 2026 categories: Glass: The Lion for Change, Dan Wieden Titanium Lions
The film is built to be shared, with a single visual loop that repeats. The narration, voiced by Chichinadze, carries the campaign’s central emotional message, a single line about flight and freedom that now has a different weight.
A Cultural Crackdown in Tbilisi
The Cannes shortlist lands inside a year of pressure on Georgia’s cultural institutions over the same protests. Nine actors resigned from the Vaso Abashidze State “New Theater” in Tbilisi after the theater’s administration removed a banner of Chichinadze that had hung on the building’s façade for over a year. The banner, which called him a “prisoner of conscience,” was taken down first to make way for promotional banners from a government-affiliated TV channel, and then removed permanently, according to a report on the nine New Theater resignations.
The walkout drew a public list of nine names, Kakha Kintsurashvili, Eka Demetradze, Nanka Kalatozishvili, Giviko Baratashvili, Davit Beshitashvili, Taso Chanturaia, Manu Tavadze, Luka Japaridze, and Irakli Japaridze, the same actors Georgia Today named as having left the theater. The Ministry of Culture had earlier dismissed the theater’s artistic director, Davit Doiashvili, after he publicly protested Chichinadze’s arrest. Since his removal, critics say the theater’s artistic activities have been largely paralyzed. FIA, the International Federation of Actors, has called publicly for Chichinadze’s release, and Amnesty International has run an urgent action. The Cannes shortlist lands after the same protests that put both creatives in prison.
What the Two Lions Reward
Glass: The Lion for Change is the Cannes Lions category that recognizes work on inequality and prejudice, per the festival’s own category page. It sits inside the “Good” track of the festival’s awards map, the section reserved for work that uses creative communications to shift culture, create change, and positively impact the world. A shortlist for the category is judged separately from the Titanium shortlist.
The Dan Wieden Titanium Lions sit on their own, outside the festival’s eight main tracks. Per the Titanium Lions entry guide, “There are no categories in the Titanium Lions. The idea is everything, whether it’s for a car or toothpaste, telecommunications or charity, with a big or low budget.” Of 137 campaigns entered this year, 18 made the Titanium shortlist. Industry tracker LLLLITL published the full list, which includes the PSP campaign, IKEA, Xbox, Vaseline, and OREO, among others.
| Category | Track | What it rewards |
|---|---|---|
| Glass: The Lion for Change | Good | Work addressing inequality and empowering marginalised communities |
| Dan Wieden Titanium Lions | Standalone flagship | Boundary-busting ideas that mark a new direction for the industry |
The two categories the PSP campaign is competing in both prize ideas over media plans, and both are judged by senior creative leaders from outside Georgia. The 2026 Titanium jury is led by Chaka Sobhani, global chief creative officer of TBWA\Worldwide, and includes Cindy Gallop, founder of MakeLoveNotPorn, and Jimmy Smith, chairman and CEO of Amusement Park Entertainment.
The Festival Will Name Winners Without Its Two Creators
A film built on the act of opening a cage now travels to the world’s biggest advertising festival with both of its named creators behind bars. The Cannes Lions stage in late June will be filled with the people who made the campaigns in that final 18, except, by any visible arrangement, the director and the narrator of one of them. Playmakers has framed the shortlist as a moment of national recognition for Georgia’s creative community.
PSP says the Cannes winners will be named on June 26. Chichinadze was arrested on December 5, 2024, and Okmelashvili on May 15, 2024. The campaign’s own line, that the pursuit of freedom is as natural for people as flight is for birds, now runs in a year when the two people who put it on screen are not free to travel. The shortlist is real, and the cages it was made to open are not metaphors.
