Georgia on our mind

“It is my life, my body and my art, so why should I compromise anything?” Taki Mumladze is talking ahead of screenings of A Room of My Own at the Batumi International Arthouse Film Festival, taking place in Georgia’s second-biggest city, on the Black Sea coast. Mumladze co-wrote the raw and intimate drama with director Ioseb ‘Soso’ Bliadze and also starred in the film, winning the Best Actress award jointly with co-star Mariam Khundadze at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival earlier this summer. It will be the first time the film has been shown to audiences in Georgia, a country where films with LGBTQ+ content are still controversial and met with protests. Mumladze’s anticipation is mixed with apprehension.

A Room of My Own was shot during the pandemic with no budget and a small crew of friends and family in the flatshare the two leads were living in. Mumladze plays Tina, a small-town girl who was stabbed by her then-husband and shunned by her family after a perceived transgression. She rents a room in Tbilisi from the more worldly party girl Megi (Khundadze), who is waiting on a visa to go to New York. Their mutual scepticism thaws into a friendship that crosses into sexual territory, as Tina gains a sense of control over her own life.

“Mariam and I talked a lot about the sex scenes, and it was our decision to include them,” said Mumladze. “I really don’t like when women’s bodies are sexualised through the male gaze but I think in our movie it is very naturalistic. I couldn’t talk about the importance of being a free and independent woman if fear of society’s reaction prevented me from doing this myself. Sex is OK, and we think the film can be like a manifesto.”

A Room of My Own is part of a wave of arthouse cinema from a bold new generation of Georgian directors who have revitalised the industry following the civil war of the 90s. Many of their films centre experiences outside conventional family roles for women and LGBTQ+ protagonists, questioning entrenched patriarchal values in a nation where the Orthodox Church still wields vast influence.

A number of these films have earned high-profile global recognition. Ana Urushadze’s wildly surrealistic, playful debut feature Scary Mother (2017), about a writer determined to publish her erotic vampire novel despite her husband’s resistance, won the award for Best First Feature in Locarno and the top prize in Sarajevo. While Dea Kulumbegashvili’s mesmerising Beginning (2020), in which the disillusioned wife of a religious leader deals with the fallout of being sexually assaulted by a police officer, scooped a record four awards at San Sebastián.

But enthusiasm abroad has not always meant popularity at home, particularly when LGBTQ+ themes are involved. Georgian-Swedish director Levan Akin’s And Then We Danced (2019) was acclaimed after its Cannes premiere and became Sweden’s Oscar contender, but its setting of a love story between two men in a traditional dance troupe was met with violent protests by the far right and members of the church on its local premieres in Tbilisi and Batumi, despite cordons of riot police outside cinemas. However, many Georgians welcomed the opportunity to see such a story on screen for the first time.

Some breakout Georgian hits occupy less contentious terrain. Alexandre Koberidze’s offbeat charmer What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), in which a curse prevents a man and woman from recognising each other after a meet-cute on a bridge, swapped grit for whimsy after his lower-profile experimental feature debut Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017), a mobile-phone venture into Tbilisi’s illegal underground worlds of gay sex work and boxing.

Other successes abroad, such as Prisoner of Society (2018), a European Film Award-nominated documentary short about a trans woman who lives locked up at home with her family, who fear she’ll be killed if she goes out, have never been screened in Georgia. Its director Rati Tsiteladze, who was able to gain the family’s trust and access due to his background as a former martial-arts champion and television personality, said he does not want to endanger the protagonists; official anti-discrimination laws were passed in Georgia in 2014 as the country tries to meet human rights criteria to join the European Union but these do not reflect the unsafe reality.

At Karlovy Vary, Tsiteladze said, “I believe Adelina’s story is so important – the way it stands now she doesn’t have a future in Georgia.” While there, he was pitching for production assistance for a follow-up on her experience immigrating to Austria (an asylum process that the first film’s success helped to facilitate).

Bliadze, the director of A Room of My Own, spoke of a current exodus of young people, particularly women, moving abroad. “If my five-year-old daughter decides to leave Georgia, it will be my generation’s fault for not doing anything to change the atmosphere in this country.

“While their parents were raised in the Soviet Union, millennials were born when there was already YouTube. These generations are talking radically different languages. And it’s not just generational – nowadays ultra-nationalist groups of homophobic and xenophobic people are getting much stronger.” He mentions last year’s obstruction of a planned Tbilisi Pride march by far-right groups, who beat more than 50 journalists, killing one. “It was really hard for us to watch this.”

In Batumi, the festival pressed ahead despite a shock cut of all government f inancing this year (an emergency fundraising campaign came to its rescue). These are adverse conditions for one of the country’s main forums for challenging cinema, and has compounded fears of a government crackdown on cultural expression under a more hardline regime. In March, Gaga Chkheidze, the director of the Georgian National Film Center and a vocal critic of state policy, was dismissed by the Ministry of Culture and replaced with their own deputy minister. Chkeidhze, who has returned to his role as director of the Tbilisi International Film Festival, which has also had its funding cut, said: “Everything is moving toward total control of the cultural sphere by the minister. This practice is well-known to Georgian society, which went through 70 years of the Soviet totalitarian system.”

But filmmakers are confident it is only a matter of time before attitudes open up in Georgia. “I don’t think the mob can hold back the younger generation, which through the internet is part of a global ecosystem not consumed by dogmatic thinking,” said Tsiteladze. And, from Mumladze: “It seems like some women’s whole lives are wasted on self-preservation. If I didn’t think we could change something, I wouldn’t have made the movie. I hope a lot of people see this who are not just in our bubble. Art is powerful.”