An Act of Life: Georgian Women’s Film and Being Human in Relation

by Ninutsa Nadirashvili October 2nd, 2025

A Personal Prologue

“Everything would be ideal,” a friend of mine wrote to me recently, “were it not for the world falling on our heads.” I had to agree. Ever since always, I’ve been looking at the cracks in the sky, the universe on the verge of crumbling down. My therapist informed me that this was ‘depression.’ Well... sure... but it also remains a fact of life, an eternal opponent. And there are two major ways I keep it from gaining total victory: art and learning. My work, which fills the mid-point of a venn diagram between gender studies, education, and literature is, unfortunately, a major aid to the enemy (dispair). I keep at it. Learning helps me see more clearly. Art – whether it be mine or someone else’s – gives me a place to rest. For the last ten years I’ve been trying to make the two meet. For example, I studied the role of poetry in shaping national identity during my undergraduate in the U.S., translated black feminist writing for a personal blog, and most recently, published a creative-critical review of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. I also wrote a profile on Georgian women in my life who live together as unconventional family units. That profile was inspired by my graduate research project about Georgian women’s counter-cinema, and is the basis of what you’re about to read.

“Ideal”. A text from Dea and news headlines on my Instagram explore page (TIME, OC Caucasus, New York Times, Al Jazeera, @Ukraine.ua).

I was raised in Tbilisi and though I left at age 13, it’s still my home. So, I write this at a time when my enemy is strong. It’s eating well. The rise of authoritarianism in Georgia has led to months-long protests, with an illegitimate government implementing pro-Russian/colonial legislation, using violence against citizens, supressing media coverage, and jailing protesters and critics. Recently, Dea Tcholokava, my childhood friend and documentary filmmaker showed me a short she made when applying to film school, titled Hoffnung/Untergang (Hope/Doom). I shift rapidly between those two, living as the forward slash in the middle. And if sometimes you live as that slash too, I offer you the lessons I’ve learned from watching Georgian films directed by women. These are lessons about agency, perspective, background noise that shapes our lives, how being human is done in relation, and the possibility of turning toward each other so that we may overturn the doom.

“Cunt”. Protest against Georgia’s illigitimate, pro-Russian government. December 7, 2024. The Hague. ( + Hardcore videos).

Setting the Stage: Georgia

The idea of a Georgian culture – similarly to others – relies heavily on gendered conceptions of bodies that push the national narrative forward. This implies that culture is constantly shaped into itself and rather than being fixed, it is “a rich resource, usually full of internal contradictions, which is used selectively by different social agents in various social projects within specific power relations and political discourse in and outside the collectivity.”¹ Additionally, identity markers such as race, gender, etc. greatly impact the access and availability of cultural resources for those who are supposed to be part of the group. For example, instead of being able to use culture for their benefit, women are often controlled by others in a collective, with their oppression legitimized by narratives of conserving or reinventing traditions.

One way that Georgian nationalist narratives allow for women to be subjugated is by placing the “burden of representation” on them.² Living women become symbolic carriers of national identity, honour, history, purity, etc. In Tbilisi, an aluminium statue of Georgia’s Mother overlooks the city, providing the impossible frames that all women are expected to fit into as they retain culture while simultaneously reproducing it. As a result, Georgian women in life – and as I will later discuss, in film – hold a strange position in their nation-state. They are at once an integral part of it, keeping it alive, and excluded from it on a regular basis, made into objects.³

Patriarchal constructions of gendered relationships between individuals remain essential to the country’s social order. Consequently, Georgian women who do not fit the role of a mother bearing the responsibility for the stability of her home become the apparent source of societal collapse. Such attitudes lead to the justification of child/early marriages, domestic violence, homophobia, and gender inequality. Thinking on these issues, Georgian women’s counter-cinema explores how definitions of a ‘good’ family, wife, husband, man, woman, and human play out in the confines of households and interpersonal relationships.

These films examine general tendencies of Georgian society when it comes to concepts such as motherhood and marriage and pay particular attention to the way that they remain influential. In doing so, they speak about “the daily and generational reproductive labour that occurs in households,” sustaining economies, cultures, and nations.⁴ Film protagonists and real Georgian women are expected to oversee the maintenance of life. For some of them, this work includes preparing food and mending clothing. For others, it may involve raising children or caring for the elderly. Regardless, all gendered bodies burdened with the task of social reproduction carry out the necessary mental, physical, and emotional work that drives society forward. Ultimately, we require a reinventing of the gender order, and with it, the reworking of what it means to be human.

ქართლის დედა (Georgia’s Mother) amidst women by Georgian artists (Kikodze, Iankoshvili, Kakabadze, Gudiashvili, Kvesitadze, Akhvlediani, Pirosmani).

Georgian Women’s Counter-Cinema

The first fictional film made in Georgia premiered in 1919 and told the story of Christine, a young peasant girl who is seduced and impregnated by the landowner in her village. After giving birth and being shamed by her family and community, she goes to Tbilisi and becomes a sex worker. There, she eventually ends up dying at a hospital without the support of any family or friends. Such tragic stories presented on the screen abound in Georgian film archives and even movies that are satyrical or humorous tend to be coupled with the depressing lived reality of local people.⁵

Similarly, female characters continue to be featured heavily in Georgian productions though rarely as protagonists. That is, until the emergence of Lana Gogoberidze – a central figure in Georgian film history. Lana’s mother – Nutsa Gogoberidze – was the first Georgian woman director, producing three films (Their Kingdom, 1928, Buba, 1930, Uzhmuri, 1934) before she was forced into exile by the Soviets. Unlike her mother, Lana’s career has spanned several decades, and more than a dozen films. The younger Gogoberidze – often drawing inspiration from her family life – emerged as a director who centered women’s stories, exploring their inner and intimate lives. Her most famous work, Some Interviews on Personal Matters tells the story of a journalist struggling to be a mother and wife while also maintaining a fulfilling career. Premiering in 1978, Some Interviews can be understood not just as a response to feminist theory but feminist theory in itself, shaped by and for the particular context of Georgian everyday life. Decades later, a group of women directors has begun to shape the country’s cinema, building on Gogoberidze’s foundations.

Some scholarship on eastern European film has reached the conclusion that today, filmmaking in this part of the world is “decentralized and depoliticized,” with direction or alternative aesthetics no longer being central.⁶ This may be true for other former-Soviet countries, but it does not apply as starkly to Georgia. A significant cause of this is Georgia’s proximity to Russia and its contested identity as a part of Europe. While western and central European countries have largely integrated the eastern bloc that is located some distance away from Russia, being the occupant’s direct neighbour does not allow Georgia the same privilege of becoming commercial.

Instead, the 21st century has seen new filmmakers emerge on the Georgian film scene, reviving the country’s cinematic traditions and finding inspiration in the transitional post-Soviet decade that most Georgians do not speak about. This group of films has largely been directed by women, highlighting women protagonists and placing great emphasis on the family. They include but are not limited to Ketevan Machavariani’s Salt White (2011), Rusudan Chkonia’s Keep Smiling (2012), Tinatin Kajrishvili’s Brides (2014), Salomé Alexi’s Line of Credit (2014), Nino Basilia’s Ana’s Life (2016), Ana Urushadze’s Scary Mother (2017), Anna Dziapshipa’s Self-Portrait Along the Borderline (2023), Elene Naveriani’s Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry (2023), Maka Gogaladze’s Ever Since I Knew Myself (2024), and Dea Tcholokava’s What Does The Mud Whisper (2025). Teo Khatiashvili (an associated professor at Ilia State University working with the themes of gender and film) argues that there is something happening in Georgian cinema and that something can be summed up as “gender trouble.” ⁷

“Woman”. All ten of the films listed in the above paragraph, in order of release date.

Along with Gogoberidze’s Some Interviews, I’ve chosen four other films that stand out to me: Nana Ekvtimishvili’s In Bloom (2013) and My Happy Family (2017), Tamar Shavgulidze’s Comets (2019), and Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April (2024). I believe they can offer not only a reflection of Georgia’s gendered and familial relations but new ways of conceptualizing both. In Bloom is about Eka and Natia, two teenage girls who deal with their turbulent family lives. My Happy Family follows Manana, a middle-aged woman who decides to move out of her multi-generational home. In Comets, Irina and Nana must face their past when reunited after three decades. And April tells the story of Nina, a gynaecologist who performs illegal abortions in western Georgia. I ask all five of these films the same two questions: Can they show me how Georgian relationalities are structured? And can they imagine alternative ways of existing?

Five Films, Five Themes

I have selected five themes according to minute details, larger prop pieces, action, and lines from characters that stood out to me personally. Some are obvious; others scream from the background. Some are clearly intentional, and others may have ended up in the scene without prior thought. In order to expand on each chosen piece, I theorise from Sylvia Wynter’s 2015 essay, “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition.”⁸

Cars

When I was little, different circumstances would force my mother to pack us into our blue van, driving not too far but not too close from the apartment. On some occasions, we slept in the backseats, covered with blankets, warm but uncomfortable. My mother, unlike many women her age, had a license. She could drive and that meant we could move. We had a certain freedom. Cars show up in major ways throughout all five films. They grab my attention, wedge themselves inside my mind. Elaborating on these scenes and taking them as inspiration, I would like to discuss individual agency, power hierarchies, and the formation of the “Human Other,” referred to by Sylvia Wynter as a product of our refusal to be co-human, an act that divides us.⁹

Soso, Manana, and Soso’s car ('My Happy Family').

The small, silver-colored Mercedes-Benz comes into My Happy Family early, on Manana’s birthday. Manana, a middle-aged woman living in a multi-generational household with her husband, children, and parents, is the protagonist of Ekvtimishvili’s second full-scale film. On the morning of her birthday, Manana and Soso – her husband – walk into the asphalt-laden yard of their apartment building and get into the silver car. Through this and following scenes we learn that Manana does not drive herself, initially needing her husband to get to work. It is only later, after Manana abruptly decides to move out and rent a separate apartment, that we see her gain the independence of movement – that which was so important to my mother during the initial years of my life – making the choice to take a bus from and to work.

In a narrative sense, this scene introduces the dynamic between Manana and Soso. Here, Manana – with an already-resigned tone – begs her husband not to buy wine for her birthday. “I am not in the mood to celebrate this birthday,” she tells him; “Don’t celebrate then. People will still come,” Soso responds.¹⁰ This, the protagonist’s simple wish to spend her day her way becomes the first and defining conflict of the film. Though simple, it is here, in the everyday denial of choice, that the film relays Manana’s position as one divided from her husband. Though she is the protagonist, Manana is also understood as the Other. She does not have the individual agency to drive or make her own decisions when paired with the Man. It is also Soso who gets the last line of the scene, telling Manana, “Do what you want. Who’s stopping you?”¹¹ Manana simply looks out of the passenger window, not replying that it is him.

One Irina arrives by car, the other – Nana’s daughter – walks to get groceries ('Comets').

Those who can pass for the human Man are naturally selected while those who cannot are dysselected, taking on otherness and becoming anomalies to the normal.¹² An obvious connection between cars, agency and men can also be found in Comets, when Nana tells Irina about her late husband. He woke up from a recurring nightmare about Irina and Nana running away and when Nana did not deny the possibility, he got in his car and drove off. “He crashed into something,” Nana concludes; “I still don’t know if it was by accident or if he wanted it to happen so.”¹³ A cab brings Irina to Nana’s village home after three decades of separation. Over the next hour, the two women try to speak frankly about how they fell in love. Irina reveals that she went off to Europe, studying, traveling and working while Nana stayed back, got married to a man, and raising children. Before they settle in for the uncomfortable discussion, Irina – perhaps to remain aloof – mentions that there’s a taxi waiting outside, ready to take her to the airport, back to Europe. Later, when something strikes a nerve for Nana, she scolds Irina for not inviting the driver in and goes off screen to bring him a glass of water. Ultimately, the car at Nana’s gate and the man driving it stand as symbols of an outside world which deems both characters as anomalies, doubly so since they are queer women.

Gogoberidze also understands the car as a symbol of agency through which power hierarchies are established. At the beginning of Some Interviews, when their marriage seems to be solid, Sopiko and her husband – Archil – discuss buying a car and going off on vacations. Following this conversation, Gogoberidze deliberately shows us numerous scenes of Sopiko walking, taking the bus, and refusing a car ride from someone she has a disagreement with. “The 21^st century will be an age of pedestrians,” Archil says.¹⁴

Sopiko’s bus ('Some Interviews').

Sopiko is also riding the bus when she sees her husband with another woman and in her desperation to save her marriage, she suggests they purchase a car again. “I have to walk so much,” she tells Archil, “I’ll learn to drive. Sometimes you can drive me.”¹⁵ Her husband is entirely uninterested. He’s already made up his mind. Their marriage is over, largely because Sopiko refuses to give up her work and spend more time at home – effectively threatening his self-imposed role of human Man. Of course, all humans (speaking now universally) exist in relation to each other. Despite this, the division between two individuals (husband and wife in the case of Some Interviews) is constantly reenacted. Wynter describes the idea of human as a praxis, a verb, an action, and in doing so, also points to the fact that being the Human Other is a repeated existence.¹⁶ As characters tell themselves about who they are in the context of relationships, they also use those narratives to construct and enact themselves.

Even more closely exemplifying the enactment of woman as Other is a scene from Ekvtimishvili’s first full-scale film, In Bloom, in which Natia becomes a victim of bride kidnapping while she waits for her turn in a line for bread. Set in the 1990s, the scene sees a black Volga (a Soviet-made car) screech into the yard where bread is being given out. Several boys step out of the vehicle, grab Natia and stuff her into the car, driving promptly away while her friend Eka screams for them to “leave her alone!”¹⁷ I understand its sudden entrance and exit as a signifier for how quickly violence can enter Georgian women’s lives, highlighting the girls’ inability to take charge of their bodies and existence. Both Ekvtimishvili’s In Bloom and Kulumbegashvili’s April show how the reproduction of violence as a characteristic of human Man also constructs the Human Other. If women wish to push against their dysselection, they could also try to don the Man’s mask – a mask of violence that is considered normal.¹⁸ Eka, for example, could use a gun on the young boys who bully her. Natia could kill her kidnapper. Nina – Kulumbegashvili’s protagonist in April – can cause serious harm to women she performs abortions on. This would align them all with selected codes of violence.

Interestingly, April is the only chosen film which shows a woman driving. During a stormy night, when Nina’s car gets stuck in mud and she is forced to spend time at a villager’s home, the audience is made to feel the discomfort and fear that comes with this loss of independence. Nina eats quietly, afraid that the father of her patient will figure out her occupation and react violently. Early scenes of the film see Nina picking up a hitchhiker and the eery atmosphere suggests that she has violent motives. Instead, Nina offers to perform a blowjob on the hitchhiker. He agrees. When Nina asks for him to reciprocate, the hitchhiker slams Nina’s head on the car wheel. Even in a scenario where agency is granted to the Human Other, the human Man can assert a hierarchy through force. Wynter argues that all human Skins must also perform to be human in the context of the “always-already programmed” existence.¹⁹ This means that Natia’s abductors and the hitchhiker are also putting on the violent mask to remain naturally selected. Still, Nina is the one left with a bleeding nose.

In Bloom’s Natia gets married to her kidnapper, per tradition (or, in Wynter’s words, per central linkages that repeat/retrope themselves through time). Along with her new husband, Kote, she starts a family that is fundamentally built on the inequality between them. Through their marriage, Kote can reconstruct himself as a human Man, allowed to take women’s bodies and claim them as his own. Meanwhile, Natia remakes herself as a child bride, a wife relegated to the role because her community will not accept an alternative outcome for a girl that has been kidnapped and most likely, raped. Natia, already naturally dysselected due to her gender, enters her new family as the Other, and she is othered consistently throughout the film by Kote because his identity as a human Man hinges on her not being one. The line between a Volga and a girl begins to blur.

Natia gets kidnapped and Natia gets married ('In Bloom').

Stairs

In Bloom takes place in 1992, during the first year of the war in Apkhazeti.²⁰ Characterized simply, the decade was one of violence, cuts in electricity, and lines for bread. Eka and Natia are charged by their families to stand in the line, on a set of steps leading to a small window on the side of the building where bread is being distributed from. Eka shows up a little late and when Natia drags her to the place in line she has been saving, the girls are yelled at by someone in line who thinks that they are cutting in. Another woman dressed in a white coat directs a delivery truck to back up near the platform and quickly drags metal shelves filled with bread into the building, but not before physically pushing everyone down the stairs and yelling “I do not care. Move back and get in line!”²¹ Natia and Eka manage to grab a couple of loaves, pay quickly, and squeeze their way out of the line. Not only do stairs evoke the division between those who have food and those who must struggle to get it, but they also speak to the girls’ need to climb from below to simply survive.

In My Happy Family, the familiar chipped walls of a stairwell show up during the film’s second scene, as Manana follows another woman up the steps to an apartment she is thinking of renting. Manana asks about the elevator on the way up and is assured by the landlord that it will be fixed, though the tone and Manana’s small smile suggest that it is unlikely. If Eka and Natia were climbing for their survival, Manana walks up the steps deliberately and slowly to her relative freedom, a place where she will have her own closet. The camera centres on her, as the other woman stays on the periphery, and we follow Manana’s gaze up.

The gaze from below is a central concept for Wynter, one she borrows from Gauchet.²² When describing her journey as a part of the establishment of a Black Studies program in the USA, Wynter speaks about the idea of her being the subject below that is doing the gazing when discussing race.²³ I believe a gaze from below does not have to be restricted to race and can involve the centring of any persons who have been systematically disadvantaged, allowing them to be the focal point and the narrator for conversations on oppression that they have experienced.²⁴ In its original definition, Gauchet referred to the gaze from below in the context of the Israelites and their monotheistic break from the religions of the Egyptian and Babylonian empires, arguing that the Israelites’ approach to their fight with a stronger power was radically original and “derived from the highly unusual standpoint of the questioner and the penetrating nature of the question.”²⁵

Nina’s drive ('April').

Throughout all five films, women directors manage to maintain a gaze from below by offering stories of protagonists who are rarely the centre of narratives in Georgia. Not only this, but they offer the stories from their perspective, whether that be by keeping them physically in the middle of the camera angle or allowing their presence/absence to be the focus in each scene. April includes numerous scenes from Nina’s point of view. We don’t get to see her but instead look at the world through her eyes. This sensation of sharing Nina’s vision is further heightened by Kulumbegashvili’s decision to layer sounds of Nina’s breathing onto the scene. Similarly, Gogoberidze has Sopiko stand behind a camera when she conducts interviews with other women. Her respondents speak to the audience – both her and us – and we hear her answer them off screen. Even more interesting is the way Gogoberidze acknowledges that Sopiko is her stand-in in this alternative semi-biographical work. In an initial scene of Sopiko walking with her coworker (Irakli), we see him turn straight to the camera and take a picture. Here, Gogoberidze is winking at the viewer. Everyone involved knows there’s a narrator, someone shaping the gaze. And that someone is a woman both in the film and outside of it. These are ways in which Georgian women’s cinema uses perspective (both presence and absence of characters) as a unique tool to fight against the process of othering. Protagonists get to choose in what ways they are seen as the Human Other.

Sopiko’s respondent and Irakli’s camera ('Some Interviews').

There are other integral moments that drive Gauchet’s ideas of questioning and penetrating forward. In My Happy Family, Manana stays out on the balcony as guests celebrate her birthday, regardless of her husband asking her to come inside. Many of the guests are men who drink copious amounts of wine, though Manana had asked Soso not to buy any. Soso visibly holds her to him and forces Manana to listen to the men toasting and then serenading her before she squirms away in discomfort. One of the women asks her husband to take her and the children home since it is getting late. He refuses. Though Manana is absent for some of these moments, her gaze is present throughout and makes the viewer doubt the sanctity of a traditional Georgian feast, questioning its structure and customs.

In Comets, though there are no stairs (perhaps signifying the lack of hierarchy between the two women), there is a door cutting our gaze. First, we watch Irina and Nana speak through a rusty gate. They are young, teenagers. Irina pouts about Nana not waking her up and refuses to open the door for some time. Thirty years later, Irina is the one standing outside of a doorway to Nana’s house as they speak about their lasting love for each other. Nana remains inside, busying herself in the kitchen. Here, the door functions as a separation between the two, a physical reminder of the barriers their relationship faces. Naturally, a kiss between them happens in a doorway.

Wynter describes how being the Human Other (for example, a woman) can open one up to systemically mistrust their own “subjectively experienced, yet ostensibly instinctive, natural, and self-evident order of consciousness.”²⁶ Showcasing such mistrust is Eka in the scenes that follow Natia’s kidnapping. At the wedding, Eka is the only one visibly disinterested in celebrating, sitting still, and looking down as those around her eat, smile, and chat with animation. She declines food offered and asks Natia to meet her in the bathroom, right before the toastmaster asks men to stand up and drink to the women in the room. Alone, Eka asks Natia whether she loves her new husband. “Yeah, I don’t know, I think so,” Natia responds, visibly annoyed by the question; “He’s a good human,” Natia adds and exits.²⁷ Here, I see Eka’s unwillingness to believe that her friend is truly happy and that the marriage is something that must naturally happen. In a way, this is when Eka identifies the existential contradiction experienced by the two of them – that feeling of self-aversion and the desire to fit alongside whoever their community understands as ‘a good human.’

So when Natia refuses to play the obedient child-bride, when Manana leaves the bazaar without buying the herbs she’s been instructed to and goes home to pack instead, when Nina prescribes a teenage patient birth control in secret because the girl does not want to get pregnant at fifteen, when Irina stays for dinner, we see characters pushing against the idea that they must put themselves on the chopping block for the reenactment of an existence that does not value them or see them as human. In Some Interviews, one of Sopiko’s respondents puts it clearly: “No, I don’t have a husband,” she says. “I don’t want to have one and I’ve never wanted one… You may not agree but all these everyday matters, thousands of details in a family… in a relationship with a man… Take care of him, wash for him, make dinner, clean up… then he’ll still say, ‘You look awful’ and you keep going on… No, no.”²⁸ This respondent, a single mother, strives to live on her own terms, distrusting the way things have always been, the way she has been told things should always be.

Background Noise

“Happy is the family with a peaceful mother who sacrifices herself for her family, raising the children,” can be heard in the background of a scene near the beginning of My Happy Family.²⁹ As Manana folds up her bedsheets from the couch where she has been sleeping, Ilia II’s sermon plays on the TV. I understand such additions into the film as examples of what Georgian women hear throughout their lives, from childhood to old age. Having Manana perform her household chores as the Patriarch speaks is another wink to the audience, the audio being so low you can barely hear it. Yet, even barely hearing the narration of who one is and who one should be is a way of constructing the self.

In her footnotes, Wynter introduces a concept that relates closely to the repeated background sermon – Harold Bloom’s retroping. Bloom argues that there are certain chains, or “certain central linkages [...] vital to tradition, and the crossings over in and between traditions.”³⁰ With each generation, each century, seemingly revolutionizing existence as a practice, the tropes beneath remain, revive, and retrope themselves. Ilia II’s sermon too is a retroping of the ideas that have been underpinning the division of woman and man in Georgia into Human Other and human Man. In simpler terms, Wynter argues that we are human because of how we remake ourselves by what we tell ourselves about ourselves.³¹ This retroping is also clear in Comets, when Nana tells Irina, “You had to go where you went and live the way you lived, and I had to stay where I stayed and live…” “The way you lived,” Irina interrupts and concludes for her with a sardonic smile.³² Another example is Lamara – Manana’s mother – taking on household chores, cooking and cleaning for her entire family, practicing her gender.

The same can be said about men. The first scene of In Bloom sees Eka sitting on the bus, returning home from school. The background noise or narration of this scene is a radio. It is hard to decipher the entire radio segment, though a sentence stands out: “In Georgia, each individual should be armed.”³³ In 1992, being human in Georgia meant being armed. Then it is no wonder that Kote kidnaps Natia or kills another boy out of jealousy. He is, after all, simply auto-instituting himself within a violent, aggressive narrative. In April, the retroping is stark and told directly through the character of a head doctor at Nina’s clinic. Finally confronting Nina about her illegal work, the head doctor says directly to the camera, “Nina, do you understand how laws work? If you want to work, you have to obey the law. I know sometimes the law may go against our moral beliefs, but that does not matter now.”³⁴ He speaks from behind a desk, rows of diplomas hanging behind him. Nina’s coworker David sits nearby. Nina is getting scolded and so are we. Though they speak and enact the codes with such harsh vigour, neither Kote, David, Archil or any men in these films can pre-exist their stories “any more than a bee, at the purely biological level of life, can pre-exist its beehive.”³⁵

Wynter further argues that “our “stories” are as much a part of what makes us human […] as are our bipedalism and the use of our hands.”³⁶ By this, she means to say that the development of humans’ ability to “tell stories and create fictitious worlds” is just as important as the origin of the physical universe and of the biological forms of life.³⁷ In short, Kote is as much determined by his biological makeup as he is by the radio broadcast in the background of Eka’s bus-ride home. This is how our current societal order sustains itself and ensures that all individuals – even those that are othered by the West are incorporated into it. This system makes our own power to change invisible by deeming the current way of existing unquestionable, irreplaceable. This is why Natia gets married to her kidnapper, why another of Nina’s patients refuses to take birth control even though she does not want to have more children, why Sopiko’s boss offers her a less-demanding position and tells her he feels sorry for her husband, why Irina and Nana keep their relationship secret.

Cranes

Some things stick in my mind because they are masterfully placed in art to do so. What else can you be stuck on than Manana’s voice as she plays the guitar, Irina’s hands clasped under the table as she and Nana lean toward each other, pictures of Sopiko strewn about Irakli’s studio as she sleeps – finally getting rest, sitting across a man who thinks she’s brilliant, the black eye darkening Eka’s face during Natia’s wedding, the sound of children playing ‘Cranes’ – a Georgian hand game – as a monstrous version of Nina stands in vast emptiness? These details invite me to think about how being human is not only a repeated practice but also one that takes place in relation with others.

During Natia’s wedding, as the rest of their friends watch Natia’s father dance, Natia turns to Eka and expresses her disappointment with the fact that Eka is not happy about her getting married. This leads Eka to enter the main room, down a glass of wine, and dance Shalakho (a traditional Georgian dance that comes from the lower classes of nineteenth-century Tbilisi). Her black eye – the one she got when an older man slapped her in the bread line – glistens as the wedding party claps and cheers. The juxtaposition between what should be a happy event and Eka’s darkened eye is only further intensified during the dance sequence. Shalakho is one of the most active, joyous, even silly dances performed at Georgian weddings. Eka’s somber expression throughout the entire dance and her eye seem to urge us to examine the entire party, its façade of a happy gathering and what drives Natia – along with many other girls who are victims of child marriage – to wear the white dress.

Eka’s dance ('In Bloom')

Wynter begins her article with a stanza from John Peale Bishop’s “Speaking of Poetry” and by doing so, sets up her theory on what it means to be human. In the poem, Bishop writes:

The ceremony must be found

that will wed Desdemona to the huge Moor. […]

O, it is not enough

that they should meet, naked, at dead of night

in a small inn on a dark canal. […]

The ceremony must be found

Traditional with all its symbols

ancient as the metaphors in dreams;

strange, with never before heard music; continuous

until the torches deaden at the bedroom door. [emphasis added by Wynter]³⁸

Here, Bishop is referencing Shakespeare’s Othello, a play that – to Wynter – re-enacts a “co-human negation on the grounds of a rational/non-rational, by-nature and, therefore, race-based Line/Divide.”³⁹ Throughout her work, Wynter describes the ceremony as a struggle and victory over our refusals to understand being human as an act in relation. It is here that Wynter necessitates the bringing back together of those who have been designated as human Man and Human Other in a way that is at once traditional, ancient, and entirely new, also describing how our ways of being in the world should be.⁴⁰ Attending her best friend’s forced wedding, consistently showing her resistance, and ultimately dancing a mourning/fighting dance for Natia, Eka is the one that the audience sees feel the aftereffects of the kidnapping. It is through Eka, who is transgressing individual boundaries to feel for her friend, that we are allowed to think on the tragedy of this Georgian tradition.

Cheers ('In Bloom' and 'My Happy Family').

In Georgian films, much of the displays of co-humanness are offered through music, dance, and feasts. This is interesting to note, since music, dance, and feasts are also used to show instances of othering, anger, and narratives being forced onto women. Yet, Natia and Eka sit at a small table in Natia’s childhood home, on the balcony overlooking tall, beige Soviet-style buildings, marking Natia’s birthday. This is the first and only true moment of peace and happiness that the film affords us after Natia’s abduction. And when the girls fill up their glasses of wine, they toast to Natia’s grandmother – seen cooking in the background of the entire film – and to all good grandmothers, and to themselves too. This toast is a contrast to the chaotic cheering to women at Natia’s wedding, appearing more genuine and allowing women to celebrate themselves.

Meanwhile, the middle of My Happy Family sees Manana attend a school reunion. Here, the toast is also more genuine than at her birthday party and women sit at the table alongside men instead of chasing around their children. An older woman, presumably the teacher that the class was most attached to, speaks about her students who have passed away, listing their names. Then, she says “You must live. You must live on behalf of our boys too.”⁴¹ In the family logic, connection between members is comically obvious, and the concept that the destruction of another is also self-destruction quite clear. Still, a familial connection is one we can form with all others. It is in these scenes of the reunion that we can find how Manana and her classmates bear the links they have with each other Without any indication that they have rehearsed or planned it, men around the table stand up and begin singing a low, polyphonic song about being out of luck. Unlike the surface serenade men sang to Manana at her unwanted birthday party, this music is one of unity. The being in being human is not only a praxis as relayed by Wynter but also an existence that must involve another. Eka is Eka because of Natia and Manana is also Manana because of her classmates. The idea of co-humanness itself becomes a rational afterthought once we understand that everyone is structured by their net of connections to the world.

Memories ('Comets' and 'Some Interviews')

The ceremony of co-humanness is found across another table in Comets. At this point, Irina has taken off her sunglasses, shedding layers of armour and opening herself to the memories of loving another human so deeply that she carried her along for thirty years. “I wanted to forget,” she tells Nana; “I also wanted that for a short while,” Nana responds, smiling a little. “Then I realised… Why should I forget?! I am who I am because I remember.”⁴² There’s a beat of silence and then Irina confirms, stating plainly how the two of them become themselves through each other: “I left you and I found myself in emptiness. I thought it was freedom.”⁴³ Then they lean forward and smile.

Gogoberidze’s Some Interviews also grapple with the false equivalence between freedom and isolation. Sopiko wishes to continue her work, but this does not mean she wants to cut off her family or lose relationships those around her. Quite the opposite, her work revolves around the idea of being with others. Even on a metatextual level, the stories of women in Sopiko’s interviews directly correspond to and shape the character’s life. In a scene where Sopiko and Archil are breaking up, she says to him, “Don’t think that I regret anything. The opposite. If I could, I would start everything all over again.”⁴⁴ A co-human existence, whether in solitude or in community is something all characters are capable of. For instance, April begins with a visual of a monstrous being, flabby, wrinkly skin, a face that is not a face, movements that are rigid and heavy. I ask myself if it’s a human. Then, we hear children playing a hand game – ‘Cranes’. And one of them addresses the monster – Nina. A human then, I decide.

“Everything will start over again.”

The final lines of both Shavgulidze’s Comets and Ekvtimishvili’s My Happy Family capture this longform. The former – “Everything will start over again.” – summarises much of what I’ve written so far.⁴⁵ And the latter serves as the central question for my analysis. Manana – angry at her husband and his justification of the retroping that controls their lives – asks, “And who are you at all?”⁴⁶ This is a question that Wynter poses for her readers to consider, and to me, a question that can change of our current understandings of ourselves.

Manana challenges her husband and though Soso never gives an answer, I believe that he has the power to understand, along with Manana, that our humanness is a direct result and perpetrator of a certain origin story. This comprehension would then allow them to breach the “Line/Divide of co-humanity” because it would mean that they have effected what Wynter calls an Autopoetic Turn/Overturn.⁴⁷ My Happy Family ends with the voices of Merab Ninidze and Ia Shugliashvili (Manana and Soso’s actors) performing a duet of the song Manana sang alone in her apartment earlier in the film. It becomes nearly impossible then, in that moment when the two voices come together, not to think of co-humanness. Similarly, when Eka and Natia go to Turtle Lake in Tbilisi and throw their gun away, they break their narrative of hurt and take full responsibility for their agency. This Turn to making clear their ability to be human in a different way may allow them to achieve an Overturn.

Help me with this ('In Bloom' and 'April').

A small transformation occurs in the final moments of all chosen films. Characters seem more ready to be with themselves and each other. In Comets, we are shown a short film that younger Nana and Irina watch in their yard. It tells a story of two aliens in love. When one of them is sent to Earth to save it from annihilation, she dies. As she’s lying on the ground, she speaks to the other alien, her partner. She says, “We too will meet each other again. And fall in love with each other. Again, on Earth.”⁴⁸ Meanwhile, Sopiko and Archil – whose marriage is now over – are no longer chained by the familial tropes that mandated their relationship. Perhaps outside of rigid codes, they will find their humanity. Gogoberidze leaves us with a sequence of just Sopiko – staring straight at us, shaking her head a little, both sad and smiling. Even in April, with its gloomy final sequence, I see hope. When told to stop performing illegal abortions for local women who desperately need her help, Nina simply answers, “If it’s not me, it’ll be someone else.”⁴⁹

In these scenes, a new way of being human can form. And this new way will no longer require origin myths but be rooted in a compassionate, inseparable relationship between self and the world. And though you and I are not protagonists of a film, if we can also comprehend that all “we have made we can unmake and consciously now remake,” then we will be left without the need for illusions.⁵⁰

Conclusion

Studying Georgian films, relationships and families has been therapeutic for me, often uncomfortable, but ultimately a harbinger of hope. Relationships are dynamic, living organisms. If we are to move to a state of care and nurturing, a shift necessitates itself in the way we understand ourselves. For me, someone who lives as the slash between hope and doom, a radical change may not happen instantly. It’s a slow process: Manana walking up the steps to a new apartment, Eka discarding the gun, Nina risking her career, Sopiko visiting her aunts, Irina daring to remember. Final moments of Some Interviews see Sopiko walking to work on the streets of Tbilisi again. The upbeat tunes of Giya Kancheli follow her and the interviews she conducts with Georgian women sound in the background. The shift, much like being human, “must be a continuous action, building on itself until it becomes the only real way.”⁵¹ An act of life.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been staring up at the cracks in the sky, the universe about to crumble down. And I’m tired of waiting. I should trying to Turn/Overturn.

Ninutsa Nadirashvili is a Georgian-American gender studies scholar, writer, and translator. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate at Coventry University and a member of the EUTERPE project, working with interdisciplinary feminist methods to explore transnational literature. She earned her bachelor’s degree in International Studies at Boston College and completed a dual master’s program in Gender Studies at the Universities of Utrecht and York. Since 2020, Ninutsa has also been actively involved in NGO initiatives based in Georgia, and in 2022, she undertook a Fulbright research fellowship in Tbilisi, focusing on an intersectional analysis of Georgian literature and language textbooks.

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