The Cannes film festival gets underway next month with a depressingly predictable lack of female directors – just three out of 21 films in the main competition are by women. Though nothing beats my favourite do-they-know-it’s-the-21st-century Cannes gaffe – when a group of women wearing flat shoes were banned from the red carpet for crimes against la féminité – it’s hardly a heartening figure.
Meanwhile, the Georgian Film Festival arrives in London this week with fewer yachts and less fake tan but a sizable chunk more of female directors – half of the films showing are directed by women. The festival has become a focus for the explosion of female film-making talent in Georgia, with a new generation of women making movies challenging gender roles in the country’s rigidly patriarchal society.
Writer-director Nana Ekvtimishvili wrote the story for the festival’s brilliant opening film My Happy Family, with a heavy dose of inspiration from her mother and sister. Her heroine is a 52-year-old teacher Manana (Ia Shugliashvili), who lives in a cramped flat in Tbilisi with her parents, husband and two adult kids – a common arrangement in Georgia, says Ekvtimishvili, who is 39 and directs as a duo with her husband, Simon Gross. Sick of being wife, mother and general dogsbody, Manana walks out on her family. ‘“Why? It’s so nice here,” asks her son, baffled. He gets cooked and cleaned for, so you can understand his confusion. On TV, an Orthodox priest in long black robes sermonises about female meekness: “Happy is the family with a peaceful mother who sacrifices herself to her family and raises children.”
I ask Ekvtimishvili, on the phone from Georgia, whether there is a rising feminist movement to correspond to the recent crop of women directors. “No,” she answers bluntly. “It’s a pity, but that’s my impression. There are women’s rights organisations and individual activists. Great women, great voices. But there is no strong feminist movement. Still, in this society people think of feminism as against our Georgian tradition, as something dangerous.” Neatly bookending the festival, the closing film is the excellently titled Scary Mother by 27-year-old Ana Urushadze, another drama about a middle-aged woman casting off the shackles of domestic servitude – this time to write a novel.
Film-maker Elene Naveriani made her 35-minute drama The Gospel of Anasyrma in 2014, but hasn’t dared to screen it in public in Georgia, because of widespread hostility to LGBT activists. The film begins as a sweet, tender love story between a man and a transgender woman (played by actor and trans activist Bianka Shigurova). But a happy ending is out of the question in the climate of homophobia and transphobia. Naveriani, 32, uses shocking real-life TV footage of a 2013 protest against an LGBT rights rally in Tbilisi, priests leading a mob of thousands against a tiny group of LGBT activists, who had to be bussed out of the city by police for their safety.
The protest was a wake-up call for the community, says Naveriani. “For me and a lot of LGBT people it felt that this kind of violence was legitimised somehow. The state was silent. A lot of people left Georgia. I’m not there any more. You feel like your life is absolutely doomed. We have anti-discrimination laws, but they don’t change anything.” A real-life tragedy has also cast a shadow on her film. As Naveriani was editing The Gospel, Shigurova was found dead in her apartment in the suburbs of Tbilisi after a suspected gas leak. “We don’t really know what happened. We think she was killed, but the case was closed really fast.”
There is a tradition of women making films in the country that goes back to the 1920s, when Nutsa Gogoberidze became the first female Georgian film director at the age of 25; she was sent to the gulag during Stalin’s purges. Neither woman I talk to has an explanation for the growing success of female directors in Georgia right now. Both wearily reel off the same kind of sexist crap that female filmmakers elsewhere have experienced. “I don’t know why we are so many,” says Naveriani. “But I think it’s really important that women are telling their stories. We need a female gaze, you know.”
Georgia 100: A Film Feast will take place at Regent Street Cinema, London (1-8 May 2018)
