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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