The premiere of Lana Gogoberidze’s film “Mother and Daughter, or the Night is Never Complete” took place

The world premiere of Lana Gogoberidze’s new film “Mother and Daughter, or the Night is Never Full” took place at the recent Berlinale. After the festival, a retrospective of the works of 95-year-old Gogoberidze, whose work is inscribed in the golden era of Georgian cinema, was held at the Arsenal cinema in Berlin. He talks about her Andrey Plakhov.

Lana Gogoberidze’s most famous film is “Several Interviews on Personal Issues” (1978). His heroine, a journalist played by Sofiko Chiaureli, encounters the fates of different women at work, empathizes with them, tries to help – and she herself does not notice how her own personal life is collapsing. Quite rightly, this picture is considered one of the first signs of feminism and women’s emancipation, which at that time were neither mainstream, nor fashion, nor agenda, especially in Georgian society and cinema. Suffice it to recall the works of the classics of the “golden era” – Rezo Chkheidze, Eldar Shengelaya, Otar Ioseliani: women most often occupy a peripheral place in them (exceptions include “The Tree of Desire” by Tengiz Abuladze and “Melodies of the Verian Quarter” by George Shengelaya).

The motives of the pressure of patriarchy and discrimination against women run through other films of Gogoberidze; the most serious of them is “The Day is Longer than the Night” (1983), a film novel set against the backdrop of Georgian history. The events are shown through the eyes of the main character Eva, who was forcibly married to the man who killed her lover.

The personal plot is included in the framework of the socio-political one associated with the Sovietization of the country. We more or less knew all this, but Gogoberidze’s new painting encourages us to see her past works in a different lens.

The film “Mother and Daughter” is dedicated to Nutsa Gogoberidze, Lana’s mother, who was the first female director in Soviet Georgia. She made two films – “Buba” (1930) and “Uzhmuri” (1934), neither of which were ever released. In 1937, Nutsa’s husband, a prominent party leader, was shot, and she herself went to the camps for ten years. Then she was rehabilitated, but she never returned to cinema, living until 1966, that is, the heyday of Georgian cinema. Lana was already filming with all her might at this time, but she saw her mother’s work much later: they were miraculously preserved in the Moscow State Film Fund. Nutsa’s daughter and her granddaughter, also director Salome Alexi, devoted a lot of effort to the restoration of the found relics and their international presentation. Film experts found in these films a lot in common with the films of Eisenstein and Dovzhenko, with “The Salt of Svaneti” by Mikhail Kalatozov and “Land Without Bread” by Luis Buñuel – masterpieces of their era.

“Uzhmuri” is especially interesting: through the Soviet plot about the collision of the old world with the new revolutionary one, another one peeks through. The malarial swamp, in which the buffalo painfully drowns, and then the positive hero of the picture flounders, can be interpreted as nature’s resistance to revolutionary changes, and as a curse of the spirits of the area, and as an image of deadly totalitarian power. But first of all, the censors were confused by the expressive, formally pointed film language, which did not fit into the canons of socialist realism.

The mother’s drama echoes persistently in her daughter’s films. In “Waltz on Pechora” (1992) we are talking about a repressed family and Georgians who ended up in the Siberian Gulag. Even “Several Interviews on Personal Issues” contains a scene of the mother returning from the camp, which the daughter is not immediately ready to accept and acknowledge.

In her farewell film, Lana Gogoberidze sums up her life and her relationship with her own family – with its past, present and future.

She sits in her office and looks through old photos on her computer. They show pictures of a vanished world: a blue living room in an intelligent Tbilisi house, Nutsa in an Uzbek robe. And in memory, or perhaps in imagination, a dance of mother and daughter appears – a moment of idyllic happiness, too strong to be real and lasting.

Dance becomes the leitmotif of Lana Gogoberidze’s work. It can be cheerful, even playful, but it still contains dramatic and tragic experience. Life appears as a dance – desperate, risky, but giving liberation and hope: after all, the night is never complete.