Sunday 29th September at 3.45pm Riverside Studios Box office 020 8237 1111 Book online

This documentary film is about one of Georgia’s regions – Racha. The title of the film is taken from the name of one of Racha’s high mountain villages. It tells about the poorest in society living in the mountains and the rise of the  SSSR. The product of a remarkable collaboration between the first Georgian female filmmaker and the leading Georgian avant-garde artist David Kakabadze. It was intended as propaganda, with real characters played by actors. Both Ghoghoberidze and Kakabadze suffered under the Soviet regime. Restored in 1980 and with recently composed music by Gio Tsintsadze.

Introduced by Lana Gogoberidze (pictured right)

Nutsa (Nino) Ghoghoberidze (1902, Kakhi in Sainglo -1966,Tbilisi) at the age of 25 became the first female film director in the Soviet Union, but only directed 3 films due to Stalinist repression.  In the late 1920s and early 1930s she was a close associate of Alexander Dovchenko, Sergei Eisenstein and Mikheil Kalatozishvili (Kalatozov). Her first documentary, Mati (Theirs), was made with Kalatozishvili. Buba, her second film, was followed by Uzhmuri (Grumpy) 1934, the first Soviet feature film made by a female director. From the middle of the 1930s she was under surveillance by the NKVD, and was excluded from cinematography, mainly because of her husband, Levan Ghoghoberidze, who had been a communist party worker. Levan was executed in 1937 and Nutsa was exiled to the Gulag for 10 years. After exile she spent the rest of her working life in the Institute of Linguistics in Tbilisi. Her name has been omitted from all Soviet encyclopaedias.