Lana Gogoberidze
November 29, 2024 to January 8, 2025
For over six decades, the work of Lana Gogoberidze, one of the most important directors in world cinema, has oscillated between two poles: intimate, private, familial – public, social, political. Thematically and formally it may be full of variety and many-sided – and as a result not easy to situate in a Georgian, Soviet or international film context – but its coherence is still tangible. Just as the director was and is involved in many things in her own life aside from scriptwriting and filmmaking – while still remaining true to herself: as literary translator and author, as member of parliament and chairwoman of a parliamentary group, as fighter for international networks of women in the film industry (she was president of KIWI – Kino Women International), permanent representative of Georgia in the Council of Europe in Strasburg and: as a passionate sports fan, as we know from her films.
The worlds of Gogoberidze's films are marked by people's everyday lives, intertwined with the problematization of gender roles, intergenerational relationships, and political questions. These mainly focus on the life experiences and perspectives of women against the backdrop of (totalitarian) history. In her films, the director enthusiastically stages expressive and unusual faces.
Only recently did Gogoberidze's entire filmic output (with the exception of her first three short and medium-length documentaries) become accessible to today's audiences. In 2022, Wiesbaden's goEast Film Festival collaborated with Frankfurt's Kinothek Asta Nielsen to present the first homage thanks to new digitizations. And it is a major stroke of luck that in 2023 the director was able to complete a film on her legacy with Mother and Daughter or The Night is Never Complete, co-directed with her daughter Salomé Alexi – perhaps the key to her life as well as the cinema and history of the Gogoberidze dynasty.
A continual international reception has been prevented on the one hand by the fact that the director had to fight again and again with Soviet censorship and that the dramatic years of upheaval in Georgia after 1989 occurred in the middle of her career; on the other hand, through the circumstance that Georgian film history is archived in Russia's Gosfilmofond. The channels to Russia's state film archive which were painstakingly re-opened after the war against Georgia have again been severed since Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine. As a bitter irony of history, it seems that the late international acclaim of Gogoberidze is now happening at a time in which Georgia's democracy is on a razor's edge.
In Gogoberidze's family, filmmaking follows a matrilineal logic spanning three generations. Lana Gogoberidze was born in Tbilisi on October 13, 1928; she was raised by an aunt. Her father Levan Gogoberidze fell victim to the Great Terror in 1937: "Like millions of others in the history of the world, the revolution first adopted my father, then made him its weapon, and, finally, swallowed and destroyed him," writes Gogoberidze in her autobiography I Drank Poison Like Kakhetian Wine (2019).
Her mother Nutsa Gogoberidze (1902–1966), Georgia's first female director, was arrested that same fateful year as a "family member of a traitor to the fatherland" and survived ten years in a gulag. She returned to Tbilisi when she was 45. Lana, meanwhile a young woman, had to get to know her own mother again. The ban of Nutsa Gogoberidze's feature film Ujmuri of 1934 also ended her directing career. In 1928, she shot the film Their Kingdom with her friend and colleague Mikheil Kalatozishvili (aka Mikhail Kalatozov); the "cultural film" Buba of 1930 was her first solo work as a director. Buba and Ujmuri remained lost for many decades until Lana Gogoberidze and her daughter managed to find the films in archives in the 2010s and finally see them themselves. Her mother never spoke about her own work as a director.
The third generation is Salomé Alexi, one of Lana Gogoberidze's daughters, who appears in several of her mother's films. She is also a filmmaker, a graduate of the film school La Fémis in Paris. In 2014, she shot Line of Credit, her first feature, and is currently finishing her second – and taking care of the subtitles, digitization, and distribution of her mother's films.
Since she was initially denied the chance of studying film, Lana Gogoberidze studied literature at Tbilisi State University. Her PhD was on one of her favorite poets, Walt Whitman, whose independence, individuality, and desire for freedom amaze her to this day...even when the quotes in her films now mostly come from Paul Éluard. Gogoberidze finally managed to study directing at Moscow's state film institute (VGIK). Her teachers were Sergei Gerasimov, Mikhail Romm, and Sergei Yutkevich, her co-students were Kira Muratova, Vasily Shukshin, Andrei Tarkovsky, Eldar and Giorgi Shengelaia, and Otar Iosseliani.
Her best known film, which also received international acclaim, is one of Soviet cinema's first feminist films: Some Interviews on Personal Matters of 1978, with the wonderful Sofiko Chiaureli in the lead role as a journalist. Lana Gogoberidze was always a feminist: Her debut feature from 1961 – made in the middle of the Khrushchev Thaw – nonchalantly tells three stories from a female perspective; Under One Sky breaks revolutionarily away from the male gaze. The literary adaptation I See the Sun of 1965 as well as When Almonds Blossomed of 1972 are bittersweet films about adolescence; at first glance, the latter portrays a happy-go-lucky teenager clique, but then recounts how the law of the father must be broken to allow for emancipation. While the fate of the victims of Stalin's crimes in Some Interviews was still one subject among many, with The Waltz on the Petschora, in 1992 Gogoberidze delivered a film based solely on her mother's documentary narratives about life in the camps and her own childhood memories. Perhaps the most opulent of Gogoberidze's films is the ballad Day Is Longer Than Night (1984); Commotion (1975) is far and away her most humorous. In the latter, an excess of song, dance, and culinary taste as well as naive painting à la Pirosmani seem to be proof of Georgians' often attested cheerfulness.
Mother and Daughter, or the Night is Never Complete had its world premiere early this year at the Berlinale Forum. The film closes a circle. The mother is "the motivation and addressee of this piece of memory work that proceeds synesthetically," writes cultural scholar Leonard Krähmer: "The film deals with passing knowledge, passion, and trauma from generation to generation as Lana's untiring voice traces the perseverance of history and thereby strides through not only the abysses of Soviet tyranny, but also rummages around the photo archive of her own family history and closely relates sequences from her own and (rediscovered) films by her mother to her own life, which has inscribed itself in them." The film testifies and shares the cinema of the Gogoberidze dynasty, rich in its sense of life and life stories, and also rich in abysses like war and terror. To survive them, poetry and prose, dance and music, and above all cinema help. "La nuit n'est jamais complète." Paul Éluard, surrealist and Gogoberidze's favorite poet. (Gaby Babić, Barbara Wurm / Translation: Ted Fendt)
In collaboration with Kinothek Asta Nielsen
With Lana Gogoberidze and Salomé Alexi in attendance on November 29 and 30, 2024 / Introductions by Gaby Babić on December 1, 2024
For over six decades, the work of Lana Gogoberidze, one of the most important directors in world cinema, has oscillated between two poles: intimate, private, familial – public, social, political. Thematically and formally it may be full of variety and many-sided – and as a result not easy to situate in a Georgian, Soviet or international film context – but its coherence is still tangible. Just as the director was and is involved in many things in her own life aside from scriptwriting and filmmaking – while still remaining true to herself: as literary translator and author, as member of parliament and chairwoman of a parliamentary group, as fighter for international networks of women in the film industry (she was president of KIWI – Kino Women International), permanent representative of Georgia in the Council of Europe in Strasburg and: as a passionate sports fan, as we know from her films.
The worlds of Gogoberidze's films are marked by people's everyday lives, intertwined with the problematization of gender roles, intergenerational relationships, and political questions. These mainly focus on the life experiences and perspectives of women against the backdrop of (totalitarian) history. In her films, the director enthusiastically stages expressive and unusual faces.
Only recently did Gogoberidze's entire filmic output (with the exception of her first three short and medium-length documentaries) become accessible to today's audiences. In 2022, Wiesbaden's goEast Film Festival collaborated with Frankfurt's Kinothek Asta Nielsen to present the first homage thanks to new digitizations. And it is a major stroke of luck that in 2023 the director was able to complete a film on her legacy with Mother and Daughter or The Night is Never Complete, co-directed with her daughter Salomé Alexi – perhaps the key to her life as well as the cinema and history of the Gogoberidze dynasty.
A continual international reception has been prevented on the one hand by the fact that the director had to fight again and again with Soviet censorship and that the dramatic years of upheaval in Georgia after 1989 occurred in the middle of her career; on the other hand, through the circumstance that Georgian film history is archived in Russia's Gosfilmofond. The channels to Russia's state film archive which were painstakingly re-opened after the war against Georgia have again been severed since Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine. As a bitter irony of history, it seems that the late international acclaim of Gogoberidze is now happening at a time in which Georgia's democracy is on a razor's edge.
In Gogoberidze's family, filmmaking follows a matrilineal logic spanning three generations. Lana Gogoberidze was born in Tbilisi on October 13, 1928; she was raised by an aunt. Her father Levan Gogoberidze fell victim to the Great Terror in 1937: "Like millions of others in the history of the world, the revolution first adopted my father, then made him its weapon, and, finally, swallowed and destroyed him," writes Gogoberidze in her autobiography I Drank Poison Like Kakhetian Wine (2019).
Her mother Nutsa Gogoberidze (1902–1966), Georgia's first female director, was arrested that same fateful year as a "family member of a traitor to the fatherland" and survived ten years in a gulag. She returned to Tbilisi when she was 45. Lana, meanwhile a young woman, had to get to know her own mother again. The ban of Nutsa Gogoberidze's feature film Ujmuri of 1934 also ended her directing career. In 1928, she shot the film Their Kingdom with her friend and colleague Mikheil Kalatozishvili (aka Mikhail Kalatozov); the "cultural film" Buba of 1930 was her first solo work as a director. Buba and Ujmuri remained lost for many decades until Lana Gogoberidze and her daughter managed to find the films in archives in the 2010s and finally see them themselves. Her mother never spoke about her own work as a director.
The third generation is Salomé Alexi, one of Lana Gogoberidze's daughters, who appears in several of her mother's films. She is also a filmmaker, a graduate of the film school La Fémis in Paris. In 2014, she shot Line of Credit, her first feature, and is currently finishing her second – and taking care of the subtitles, digitization, and distribution of her mother's films.
Since she was initially denied the chance of studying film, Lana Gogoberidze studied literature at Tbilisi State University. Her PhD was on one of her favorite poets, Walt Whitman, whose independence, individuality, and desire for freedom amaze her to this day...even when the quotes in her films now mostly come from Paul Éluard. Gogoberidze finally managed to study directing at Moscow's state film institute (VGIK). Her teachers were Sergei Gerasimov, Mikhail Romm, and Sergei Yutkevich, her co-students were Kira Muratova, Vasily Shukshin, Andrei Tarkovsky, Eldar and Giorgi Shengelaia, and Otar Iosseliani.
Her best known film, which also received international acclaim, is one of Soviet cinema's first feminist films: Some Interviews on Personal Matters of 1978, with the wonderful Sofiko Chiaureli in the lead role as a journalist. Lana Gogoberidze was always a feminist: Her debut feature from 1961 – made in the middle of the Khrushchev Thaw – nonchalantly tells three stories from a female perspective; Under One Sky breaks revolutionarily away from the male gaze. The literary adaptation I See the Sun of 1965 as well as When Almonds Blossomed of 1972 are bittersweet films about adolescence; at first glance, the latter portrays a happy-go-lucky teenager clique, but then recounts how the law of the father must be broken to allow for emancipation. While the fate of the victims of Stalin's crimes in Some Interviews was still one subject among many, with The Waltz on the Petschora, in 1992 Gogoberidze delivered a film based solely on her mother's documentary narratives about life in the camps and her own childhood memories. Perhaps the most opulent of Gogoberidze's films is the ballad Day Is Longer Than Night (1984); Commotion (1975) is far and away her most humorous. In the latter, an excess of song, dance, and culinary taste as well as naive painting à la Pirosmani seem to be proof of Georgians' often attested cheerfulness.
Mother and Daughter, or the Night is Never Complete had its world premiere early this year at the Berlinale Forum. The film closes a circle. The mother is "the motivation and addressee of this piece of memory work that proceeds synesthetically," writes cultural scholar Leonard Krähmer: "The film deals with passing knowledge, passion, and trauma from generation to generation as Lana's untiring voice traces the perseverance of history and thereby strides through not only the abysses of Soviet tyranny, but also rummages around the photo archive of her own family history and closely relates sequences from her own and (rediscovered) films by her mother to her own life, which has inscribed itself in them." The film testifies and shares the cinema of the Gogoberidze dynasty, rich in its sense of life and life stories, and also rich in abysses like war and terror. To survive them, poetry and prose, dance and music, and above all cinema help. "La nuit n'est jamais complète." Paul Éluard, surrealist and Gogoberidze's favorite poet. (Gaby Babić, Barbara Wurm / Translation: Ted Fendt)
In collaboration with Kinothek Asta Nielsen
With Lana Gogoberidze and Salomé Alexi in attendance on November 29 and 30, 2024 / Introductions by Gaby Babić on December 1, 2024
Link Contributors
For each series, films are listed in screening order.
