Tato Kotetishvili was a Georgian/Dutch filmmaker. He studied at the Theatre and Film Institute in Tbilisi, and from 1981 to 1990 worked as a director at the Georgian State Film Studio. There he made the films The Train and Anemia.

In 1990, he made a part of the long episodic film City Life. In the same year, Kotetishvili emigrated to the Netherlands and made two films here with his partner Ineke Smits: Rose, Violet and Lily (a satire of the Stalin era), and Nostalgia. This latter film, a documentary, gives a picture of a journey that Kotetishvili made to Georgia almost ten years after his departure. A few days after returning from his former homeland, Kotetishvili suddenly died, and Smits then completed the film.