Wheelchair accessible, English subtitles (SDH captions for Lena River), Pay-what-you-can tickets (£0-£8)
Gogoberidze’s 1978 film dares to show the uncomfortable. Unlike most cultural products from USSR’s long ‘stagnation’ under the ageing Leonid Brezhnev, Some Interviews has both socio-political relevance and artistic merit in spades. Its protagonist Sofiko is a middle-aged journalist who travels around Sakartvelo (Georgia) to interview victims of patriarchy and state corruption. The most important men in Sofiko’s life – her husband and her editor – want the heroine to take a promotion that comes with higher pay and more free time but will consign her to tedious desk work. When she refuses, her husband cheats on her. Cast as the eponymous character, the great Georgian actress Sofiko Chiaureli delivers a remarkable performance, visceral in its quiet rage, irreverent, and, in places, funny. The film’s modernist camerawork, proficient use of music and haunting flashbacks to Sofiko’s childhood, punctured by her mother’s arrest in the Stalinist purges, create an unexpected world on screen – a world dominated by corrupt men and their communist state, yet maintained and animated by women. Barely a russian word in sight (and one brief rendition of a russian nursery song in sound), Some Interviews is Gogoberidze’s love letter to Sakartvelo’s women and their country. Among other questions, one is left to wonder – how did the censors allow it?
Content notes: discussions and depictions of misogyny and, occasionally, arbitrary state violence.
Access notes: mix of bright and dark images, some fast cuts and loud sounds (singing, instrumental music).
Curated by misha irekleh
Reviews
‘There’s a restless, bustling nervous energy to this Georgian movie from 1978; it’s a romantic comedy of manners from director and co-writer Lana Gogoberidze with a freewheeling kind of New Wave feel, set in a city for which the term Swinging Tbilisi isn’t quite right, but certainly a busy, modern place for busy, modern people.’
Peter Bradshaw, 4/5 stars, The Guardian
‘Lana Gogoberidze is part of a women filmmaker generation who put women issues on screen from a female perspective. Not unlike the French feminist film movement, her film proclaims that there are things that exceed men’s understanding on women matters, and thus women should take control of cinematic means and openly speak about what concerns them. This is precisely what Sofiko does in the film, perhaps as a prolongation of the director herself, but still she is less of a militant feminist and more of a woman with her double existence (family-work). Her activism suggests that under certain circumstances, being conscious of and challenging the impossibility that is demanded from a woman to simultaneously be a mother/wife and still work independently, is a fundamental form of being politically active in a community.’
Antonis Lagarias, East European Film Bulletin
Short: Lena River (Svetlana Romanova, Chelsea Tuggle, Sakha Republic, 2015)
Part video essay, part found-footage film, part participant documentary, this short can rightly be described as ‘guerilla filmmaking’ in the best sense of the term. Shot across two continents – North America and Asia, it cuts together footage of and by Romanova, an indigenous Sakha/Even (Yakut) woman from North Asia, with news broadcasts and other third-party footage from her native Sakha Republic. Made outside the formal structures of the film industry and without funding, the film’s experimental and, at times, low-quality visuality creates a gritty aesthetics that haunt the colonial dispossession of indigenous peoples around the world. As Romanova reflects on her multiple erasures as member of a colonised group and a woman, we are shown the dramatic topography of the titular Lena River, traditionally known as Улахан Өрүс/Ulahan Orus or ‘Big River’ by the Sakha. Later, the film sutures this footage with images of Rio Grande, another big river stolen from the indigenous Navajo by the US and Mexico. Lena River/Улахан Өрүс ends with Romanova reading an English-language poem about the ongoing exploitation of indigenous groups and their natural wealth in the twenty-first century as she walks on the banks of a large waterway. As is often the case with this film, we are not quite sure what this waterway is, the opacity of location working to drive home the point about the universally destructive impact of global capitalism on indigenous peoples, their nature and way of life.
Content notes: references to hunting, discussions of racism, colonialism, gender and state oppression.
Access notes: visual storytelling, some low-definition footage, some loud sounds (singing, instrumental music, sounds of nature).