Cinema
ბუბა
Nutsa Gogoberidze · 1930
Synopsis
In the mountains of Racha, an enclosed province of western Georgia, the camera follows the work and isolation of the peasants: the slopes, the animals, the tools, the gestures that winter imposes. Clouds race over the Caucasus, torrents run down, and the editing brings these forces together with the hardship of the men; the film finally shows what the new century is about to change in the valley.
Context
The shooting was done with the avant-garde painter David Kakabadze, whose eye can be read in the framing and in the editing; the film had nevertheless been commissioned as propaganda. Its director had already co-signed a documentary with Mikhail Kalatozov. The copies disappeared from the archives after the arrest of 1937 and came back to light only with the great American retrospective of 2014, forty-eight years after the death of the woman who had made them. Her daughter Lana, also a filmmaker, devoted a portrait to her in 2023; her granddaughter Salomé Alexi is also a director.
Who it is for
A short silent documentary, long impossible to find. It is worth knowing that Racha was then one of the most isolated provinces of the country, and that it could only be entered on foot or on horseback.
Prizes and reception
Work of the first Georgian woman director, erased from the archives for decades, and one of the country's silent films that foreign programmers have brought back to light.
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