What a unique documentary, featuring three generations of women from the same Georgian family: Georgia’s first female film director Nutsa Gogoberidze, her daughter Lana Gogoberidze, soon to be 96, and her daughter Salomé Alexi. With Salomé as producer and co-director, Lana has made a documentary about her mother Nutsa, previously completely forgotten by film historians. As a young wife and mother, Nutsa’s life in the 1930s was a veritable Soviet rollercoaster ride: she directed poetic documentary Buba in 1930 and Uzhmuri, an intense fictional work set in a marshland preordained for draining, in 1934. The latter was immediately banned, her career was destroyed, the films disappeared for decades and she herself was sent to one of Stalin’s ‘great terror’ prison camps in Siberia, north of the Arctic Circle. Following her release and return, she never talked about her films – but why not?
Most tragically, Nutsa lost her husband and – for many years – her daughter, too. But Lana’s documentary about the hard times and her relationship with her mother is warm; even poetic. Her own films bear surprising parallels to her mother’s work. A rich mosaic of the Gogoberidzes’ cinematic and political family history as strong women in patriarchal Georgia is created with both photographs and views from the Tbilisi home and the films they made.
Timo Malmi