‘I’m not sure if life is about meeting or separating’. Thus opens the Lana Gogoberidze’s Mother and Daughter. It is a remarkable documentary about a remarkable female Georgian filmmaker – her mother, Nutsa – made by a remarkable nonagenarian director. Gogoberidze also narrates her film, talking us through her family’s devastating story.
Nutsa was Georgia’s first female filmmaker, making both fiction and documentary features in the 1930s. Lana’s line about meeting or separating refers to some photos of her as a young child with her mother – was her mother about to set off on location again or was she returning home? Lana’s father Levan is also in the photo, his silhouette casting a shadow over his subjects as he takes the pictures. Lana ponders whether her mother’s lengthy estrangements were justified – ‘was it worth a child’s tears?’ – and this is a hard question to answer seeing as Nutsa’s films were banned and disappeared almost as soon as they were released. Yet the photos Lana has of her mother show a lone woman in the company of men as she treks and traipses through inhospitable terrain to make her films, often with a smile on her face.
These were the years of the Great Terror and soon the secret police would come knocking first for Levan, a convinced Communist who would be executed for his dissent, and then Nutsa, who was arrested and disappeared for ten years. Those ten years were spent in gulags, one of which was in the Arctic Circle, the female prisoners trudging through the snow and bitter temperatures to Vorkuta, where they were ordered to build a new industrial town. On her return from this freezing hell, Nutsa recounted imagining holding her daughter’s hand as she walked through the icy landscape, and that all the women alongside her were imagining the same thing. The women in the camp, who had almost nothing and would wear all the clothes they possessed, would unthread those precious garments and reknit items to send to their children. One of those dresses reached Lana and she wore it for years, long after she had outgrown it.
There are so many tales of horror and pain. Nutsa’s siblings are either imprisoned or exiled. Lana’s Uncle Rajden, who studied under Einstein and Planck, and who took in Lana when her mother was arrested, is accused of being a Germanophile and dies of dysentery in prison. Her aunts Keto and Maro flee to Paris.
Counterbalancing the horror are happier memories: the literary salons held in Nutsa and Levan’s Blue Room (recreated through collages of writings and images), the fascinating and friendly visitors, Rajden’s kindness, the generosity of friends who took in Nutsa and gave her work on her return, the sisters’ reunion. Bittersweet memories include that of Jenevieva, the half-French nanny who sang Frère Jacques to Lana, a song that recurs throughout the film.
When the Soviet Union fell, Nutsa’s films were rediscovered and in a beautiful symmetry, Lana discovers that places where she had filmed were also depicted in her mother’s films. This documentary was made with a co-director, Lana’s daughter Salomé Alexi, three generations of female filmmakers from the same family all coming together in this film.
The documentary’s subtitle comes from the title of a poem by Paul Eluard which states ‘after grief an open window’. In her film, Lana demonstrates that this is true: after all the pain and suffering and loss, there is still a life to live and to share. In notes secretly taken by police at a meeting in 1934, Nutsa states: ‘I have a feeling we’re standing at a crossroad from which every direction is fatal’. As we stand at our own crossroad in 2025, it is worth remembering (and perhaps repeating as a mantra) Lana’s own words: ‘Dictatorship is temporal, art is eternal’.
