Abuladze's reputation is, however, based on a trilogy of films that deal with fundamental questions of good and evil, love and hate, life and death. The first of these, "The Plea" (1968), was inspired by the poems of Vazha-Pshavela and shot in black-and-white against the severe Georgian landscape familiar from other films of the time. The second film in the trilogy, "The Wishing Tree" (1971), was an epic tale set in the same landscape and focusing on the hopes and reveries of a young woman and a man's search for the mythical tree that will make dreams come true. "The Wishing Tree" won festival prizes in Moscow, Czechoslovakia and Italy, and was awarded the State Prize of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. From 1974 Abuladze taught at the Rustaveli Institute from which he had graduated three decades earlier.