NUTSA (NINO) GOGOBERIDZE
Nutsa Gogoberidze was born in 1902 the Georgian province of Saingilo (now Azerbaijan). Her father, a teacher, encouraged all six of his daughters to go into higher education. Fluent in Georgian, Russian, German and French, she studied philosophy in Tbilisi, then in Jena (1923-1925). On her return to Georgia she met the young Bolshevik leader Levan Gogoberidze, whom she married, despite her family’s opposition. She was hired by the film studio in Tbilisi, and with Mikhail Kalatozov (born Mikheil Kalatozishvili) co-directed a short documentary against the Menshevik government of the Democratic Republic of Georgia (1918-1921), Ikh tsarstvo (Their Kingdom, 1928). Her first feature film, the impressive Buba (1930), bears a family likeness to Sol Svanetii (Salt for Svanetia), Kalatozov’s documentary of the same year. The film was banned almost immediately. Shelved in the archives of Gosfil’mofond, it was rediscovered in 2013 and made a sensation at film festivals. Her second film, Uzhmuri (1934), suffered from the repercussions of the dissolution of the Association for Proletarian Writers (RAPP) on 23 April 1932. Her screenplay no longer appealed to the taste of the moment. Sergei Eisenstein, Viktor Shklovsky and Alexander Dovzhenko intervened but the film was banned, then lost. It was found again in December 2018 at Gosfil’mofond. In December 1936, her husband Levan Gogoberidze, from whom she had been separated for years, was arrested on Beria’s orders. He was executed on 21 March 1937. Fired from the studio, Gogoberidze made her living by translating the tales of Perrault, under a false name. She was arrested in late 1937 as “a relative of an enemy of the people”, and condemned to 10 years’ exile, first in a camp in Potma, Mordovia, then in a camp for women in Vorkuta. When she returned from the Gulag, she took a job in the linguistics department in the University of Tbilisi. She died in 1966, having seemingly passed on the baton to her daughter, Lana Gogoberidze, an important Soviet filmmaker of the Thaw generation (and who refers to her mother in her 1978 film, Ramdemime interviu pirad sakitxebze, Some Interviews on Personal Matters). Her grand-daughter Salomé Alexi, a graduate of La Fémis in Paris, made her first feature film, Kreditis limiti/Line of Credit, in 2015.

Irène Bonnaud and Bernard Eisenschitz