HU 1969 | Director, screenplay: Márta Mészáros | Camera: János Kende, Tamás Somló | Editing: Zoltán Farkas | Production: Ágnes Varga, Mafilm | b/w | DCP | 14 min | hungarian OV with english SUB | Coproduction Office

Márta Mészáros' moving tribute to her father. László Mészáros was a promising sculptor in 1930s Hungary. In 1935, he and his family immigrated to the USSR, to Kyrgyzstan specifically. There, only a few years later, László Mészáros would be arrested and shot in the scope of Stalin's Reign of Terror. Shortly thereafter, Márta Mészáros' mother died while giving birth. These traumatic experiences would become one of the central touchstones in her work, which Márta Mészáros would revisit on multiple occasions in her feature films.

„His art died in 1938 when they took him away. I don’t remember much of my father, so I am trying to re-evoke his image through this film. I want to re-create his life and trace his thoughts, to follow the road that made him a talented Hungarian sculptor.“ (M. Mészáros)

GEO, FR 2023 | Director: Lana Gogoberidze | Co-Director: Salomé Alexi | Screenplay: Lana Gogoberidze | Camera: Jean-Louis Padis | Editing: Lana Gogoberidze, Elene Murjikneli | Music: Reso Kiknadze | Sound Design: Irakli Ivanishvili | Szenenbild: Simon Machabeli | Production: Salomé Alexi, 3003 FimProduction | Coproduction: Jean-Louis Padis, Manuel Cam | Colour and b/w | DCP | 89 min | georgian OV with english SUB | Manuel Cam

Is life about meeting or separating? Georgian director Lana Gogoberidze asks this question at the start of the film, as photos appear: almost like a miniature film, she is seen as a child being embraced by her mother Nutsa. In Gogoberidze’s family of intellectuals and artists, filmmaking follows a matrilinear logic across three generations. Nutsa Gogoberidze was Georgia’s first woman director, before being separated from her family for ten years as a gulag prisoner, and entirely cut off from her censured oeuvre for the rest of her life. Together with her daughter Salome Alexi, Lana Gogoberidze sets out to bring together the pieces of Nutsa’s life. They find her lost works Buba (1930) and Uzhmuri (1934). Lana on the set of her previous films, surrounded by her film crew family: filmmaking as a collective practice of care and tenderness. Her film is at once autobiography, declaration of love and grieving process – Lana’s legacy, which also contains that of her mother, who inspired her to create strong, free women characters who defy dark times. The Gogoberidze dynasty countered the abyss with poetry, dance and cinema – lives divided, but shared. (Gaby Babić, Berlinale Forum 2024)

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