Uncovering the Past: The Resurgence of Doca Film Club and Georgia's Long-Lost Era
In the heart of Tbilisi, at the Amirani Cinema, the final week of the Doca Film Club's season is upon us. This unique cinematic journey, which was originally scheduled for last November but was delayed due to Georgia's political turbulence, is now unfolding, offering a captivating exploration of Georgia's past through the lens of its documentary cinema.
The season, researched by Lika Glurjidze and Luka Bedoshvili, features a diverse range of films that delve into various aspects of Georgia's history, culture, and society. The programme includes screenings of "The Endings" (2009) and "Nostalgia" (1999), two films that promise an immersive experience for the audience.
"The Endings," a film of almost liturgical stillness, depicts elderly villagers moving through snow and rituals performed in a vacuum left by emigration and death. On the other hand, "Nostalgia" revisits the intimate devastations of the civil war, showing how history dismantles friendship, love, and memory from within.
The choice of Amirani Cinema is significant. Adapted for wheelchair users and providing English subtitles, it extends the reach of these films beyond local nostalgia, insisting that they belong within a global conversation on post-Soviet societies and renewal.
The screenings are priced at 10 GEL (five for students and Doca members), positioning them as a civic ritual rather than a commercial venture. This affordable price point ensures that the films are accessible to a wide audience, making the Doca Film Club a cultural institution that truly serves the community.
The programme argues that Georgia's most urgent contemporary dilemmas, such as migration, memory, and marginalization, were already being filmed with startling clarity thirty years ago. Films like Aleksandre Zhghenti's "Do We Need the Soviet Union's Football Championship?" (1991) and Omar Gvasalia's "Meet Our Children" (1988) and Levan Kitia's "Track" delve into the atmosphere of late-Soviet adolescence, foreshadowing a generation about to confront a radically unstable landscape.
Two evenings are devoted to women's voices, featuring the short films of the early 1990s like "I Am" and "My Nabadi." Lia Jaqeli's films, such as "The Invisible," "All Important," and "I Don't Know," are a retrospective that sharpens the focus on women's voices and documents marginalized lives in Georgia.
The double program of "America in One Room" (2007) and "Of Course, America" (2009) brings the 1990s emigré narrative into sharp focus, dismantling the mythologies of the West that haunted the Georgian imagination after independence.
As we sit in the darkened auditorium of Amirani, watching these films, we are reminded that each frame carries an afterlife, an accusation, and a warning. The Doca Film Club season proposes a form of cultural work more radical than any blockbuster premiere: to sit with the ghosts of the 1990s and 2000s, to let them breathe again, and to ask-without the comfort of closure-what these fragments demand from the present.
This article was written by Ivan Nechaev. For more information about the Doca Film Club's new season (September-October 2025), focusing on Georgian documentary cinema of the 1990s and 2000s, please stay tuned.
