Ravaging Mingrelia to build a new Soviet future: “Uzhmuri” at the 2024 Samizdat Film Festival6 min read
Nutsa Gogoberidze’s third and final film, the black-and-white silent Uzhmuri (1934), explores the Soviet mission to modernise society through a ghostly Mingrelian folktale. Though meant to be a propagandic work in support of communism, it instead operates as an early environmental film, one that celebrates ethnic traditions rather than degrading them.
Uzhmuri opens with lingering shots of ripening fruit and blossoming subtropical plants, the flora of Mingrelia thriving under the sunny Colchis sky. But within this subtropical climate, mosquitos thrive, carrying with them the threat of deadly malaria. To combat this disease, the Soviet Georgian government enacts a plan to drain the Mingrelian swamplands, an industrial project that threatens to upend the traditional Mingrelian way of life.
Located in western Georgia, Mingrelians were considered a separate group by both Soviet officials and their tsarist predecessors due to their political and cultural distinction from the rest of Georgia. Many of their region’s cultural features, including the Mingrelian language, long predate the Christianization of Georgia in the 4th century, although Orthodox Christianity plays a strong role in daily life today.
One such traditional folk belief was that of evil spirits known as uzhmuri. According to Soviet Georgian ethnographers working in the 1930s, possession by uzhmuri and the subsequent healing process was illustrative of the conflict between the secular (communist) and religious worldviews of that time.
In Nutsa Gogoberidze’s film of the same name, the Soviet industrial project to drain the Mingrelian swamps requires workers to build a canal through the Uzhmuri Valley, a swampland which tradition says is home to the Queen of the Toads, a legendary spirit of Mingrelian tradition. Craving worship, the spirit carries off any disobedient passerby into the marshy swamps to marry her. Her passions are said to ignite the very swamp cane around them, and the villagers warn that no one has ever returned from the valley alive.
The deep belief of the local villagers in the uzhmuri legend is utilised throughout the film in a variety of ways. For the village elders, their folk beliefs blend with their strong Orthodox Christian faith, both of which stand in opposition to the new communist system. Gogoberidze delicately balances a sympathetic portrayal of the superstitious villagers with the promise of a new Soviet era through the relationship between the industrial and handsome kolkhoz leader Kavtari and his love interest Tsiru. The pair serves as a stand-in for the modern Soviet couple, volunteering to build a dam for the drainage project in defiance of old-fashioned superstition. Kavtari also rejects the warnings of the villagers and tosses away folk medicine given by the village women to cure his younger-brother’s so-called possession; later, he chooses to brave the Uzhmuri Valley.
Tsiru’s father, Parna, and his servant Iagundisa, in contrast, use the villager’s beliefs to forward their own goals, spreading gossip throughout the village in order to sabotage Kavtari and Tsiru’s marriage and the Soviet project as a whole. The film depicts a central clash between progress and tradition, though one which Gogoberidze presents as more nuanced than Soviet censors were ultimately willing to accept.
In addition to exploring ethnic folk beliefs and their suppression in the Soviet modernisation project, Gogoberidze’s film comments on the heavy toll exacted upon the environment by the ambitious regional development of the era. Early on in Uzhmuri, scenes of a machine pulling mud from the swamp are followed by a villager’s lament:“They are ruining and ravaging my country! My Mingrelia!” Later, a woman complains that the kolkhoz is “burning the fields and drying the swamps … soon it will be impossible to even catch a leech.”
Gogoberidze’s depiction of industrialisation does not invite the viewer’s support; instead, accompanied by Giya Kancheli’s frenzied score, it warns of an ecological disaster, the death of the flourishing flora shown in the film’s opening montage.
Yet, Gogoberidze also acknowledges the reasons for the destruction.
“Thousands of hectares of land have been rotting away for centuries under these swamps while we languish through life in poverty. We suffer and die in these swamps. We, workers of Kolkhoz, will take the swamps of Mingrelia by storm,” a kolkhoz leader says.
With the exception of Parna, the majority of the villagers live in deep poverty. Their homes are humble: four walls situated around an open fire with no floors but the dirt beneath them. By clearing the swamps, their land can be used for agriculture, and the villagers would finally be spared the constant threat of disease and death at the hands of the malaria-ridden mosquitos in the marsh.
Gogoberdize, while a skilled storyteller, worked within the confines of filmmaking in that day and age. The cinematography itself, as well as its editing, is often choppy, and the film ends rather abruptly. Kavtari and Tsiru are successfully reunited, but the fate of the canal is left unresolved. Presumably, Kavtari will return to Uzhmuri Valley and continue his work, but there is no guarantee that the very real threat of malaria, or of drowning in mud, won’t be his undoing. While an intriguing look at early Soviet Georgian film, the piece’s primary value is as an artefact of a trailblazing Georgian filmmaker rather than as a technical masterpiece.
Gogoberidze’s familial legacy
Nutsa Gogoberidze was born into a period of great social upheaval in Georgia at the start of the 20th century. She married Bolshevik leader Levan Gogoberidze, who rose to be the First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party in 1930. Their fates would become closely intertwined over the ensuing years. Her first film, Their Kingdom (1928), which she co-directed with Mikhail Kalatozov, was Georgia’s first documentary feature, a propagandic piece of work against the Menshevik government of the Democratic Republic of Georgia. Her second documentary feature, Buba (1930), focused on the remote mountainous region of Racha. Her third and final film was Uzhmuri, which was the first Soviet feature film to be directed by a woman.
As her husband’s political career collapsed into freefall amid widespread repression throughout the Soviet Union, Gogoberidze’s films were banned and thought to be destroyed. Buba was only found in the archives of Gosfilmofond in 2013, while Uzhmuri was rediscovered in the same archives in 2018.
In 1936, Gogoberidze’s husband Levan was arrested; he would be shot in Tbilisi just a year later as part of the Great Purge. In turn, Nutsa Gogoberidze was arrested in late 1937 as “a relative of an enemy of the people” and condemned to 10 years in exile. After she returned to Georgia, she worked in the linguistics department of the University of Tbilisi. She never made another film.
Though she produced only a few works, Nutsa Gogoberidze’s film-making legacy has been continued by her descendants.
Gogoberidze’s daughter, Lana Gogoberidze, was an important Soviet filmmaker of the Thaw generation. Many of her films, which emphasise the female perspective, deal with aspects related to her own life. For example, her 1978 feature Some Interviews on Personal Matters includes flashbacks to a childhood spent in an orphanage and other relatives because the protagonist’s mother, like Nutsa Gogoberidze, had been exiled to the Gulag.
Her granddaughter, Salomé Alexi, debuted her first feature film, Line of Credit, in 2015, continuing the themes presented by her mother and grandmother.
Lana Gogoberidze is now currently working on a documentary about her mother, using both archival materials as well as footage from her films, including Uzhmuri.
“The theme of my film represents the story of a woman who was struck by the cataclysms of an entire century,” Lana Gogoberidze told Variety.
Uzhmuri is premiering in Scotland on 2 October as part of the 2024 Samizdat Film Festival.
