Meet Part | Mothers Daughters

This audiovisual essay places Chantal Akerman’s Les rendezvous d’Anna / Meetings with Anna (France/Belgium, 1978) in dialogue with Lana Gogoberidze’s Ramdenime interwiu pirad sakitchebse / Some Interviews on Personal Matters (Georgia SSR, 1978). The piece centres the filmmakers that carve out a “room of their own” by not conforming to an expected style of film practice, be it European art house in the case of Akerman or Soviet logocentric melodrama in the case of Gogoberidze. Although made in different contexts – Akerman worked mostly in Belgium and France, Gogoberidze during this stretch of her career in Georgia, when it was part of the Soviet Union – I was struck by these films’ thematic, ethical, political, and personal resonances. Both films feature ambitious women whose identities are substantially shaped by the traumatic events drawn from the authors’ own lives. Click here to view the video essay. It is also available on Vimeo.