★★★★☆
Kote Mikaberidze’s 1929 slapstick satire My Grandmother is a brilliant piece of Soviet Georgian cinema still relevant today.
Mikaberidze’s My Grandmother (Chemi Bebia) is one of the most daring and playful films to emerge from early Soviet cinema — an anarchic gem originally created as a critique of Soviet bureaucracy. In the end, it proved too satirical and too ‘formalist’ for the Communist Party’s taste and was promptly shelved for the next forty years.
The first part of the film depicts the daily routine of a Soviet office worker: paper-pushing, idling, and running in circles through an endless bureaucratic maze. A decision to grant workers ₽50 (around $485 in today’s money) to continue an important task drags on for weeks because of grotesque, puppet-like bureaucrats. This sequence inevitably recalls another satirical take on Soviet bureaucracy, Eldar Shengelaia’s Blue Mountains, or An Unbelievable Story (1983), which shows that the endless procedures and inefficiencies Mikaberidze mocked so sharply had not disappeared even half a century later.
The second part of the film follows a deceptively simple plot: an incompetent, lazy bureaucrat is fired after a caricature mocking his idleness appears in a newspaper. Fearing his wife’s wrath, he desperately seeks a ‘grandmother’ — a powerful patron whose recommendation will secure him another job. This search becomes a metaphor for the entire Soviet system, where connections, favoritism, and absurd hierarchies consistently outweigh merit or effort.
Mikaberidze employs slow motion, animation, and frenetic montage, all paired with Irakli Gamrekeli’s striking set designs, to create a film of unforgettable visual power. Several scenes stand out: the wife returning home with an armful of parcels before breaking into a frenzied, dizzying dance so intense she fails to notice her husband’s attempted suicide; or the subtle commentary on consumerism when she later compiles a lengthy shopping list of future purchases.
After the ban of his debut, actor-turned-director Mikaberidze went on to work on dozens of more ‘acceptable’ projects. Yet almost a century later, it is this once-suppressed masterpiece that is remembered and rightly celebrated as one of the great avant-garde films of the 20th century.
Film details: My Grandmother (1929), directed by Kote Mikaberidze. The film was screened at the 2025 London Georgian Film Festival on 2 October, complete with a live soundtrack from John Sweeney. It is also available to watch on Klassiki.
