Georgian Cinema Now Symposium—Activism in Authoritarian Times: The Republic of Georgia as a Case Study

  • Imprisoned Georgian journalist Mzia Amaglobeli; Photo by Zurab Tsertsvadze/EPA

  • Tamara Mshvenieradze: A Review Lesson, 2026

  • Tamara Mshvenieradze: A Review Lesson, 2026

  • Tamara Mshvenieradze: A Review Lesson, 2026


Free and open to the public. Tickets available at the admissions desk beginning at 11 AM. 


Georgian Cinema Now Symposium—Activism in Authoritarian Times: The Republic of Georgia as a Case Study



Free Admission

Copresented by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at UC Berkeley

Promotional partner: Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Stanford University

  • Salomé Asatiani

    Salomé Asatiani (Prague) is a journalist and podcast host at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Georgian Service, based in Prague. For over eight years, she has been hosting and producing Asatiani’s Corner, a popular podcast series devoted to literature, film, music, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, feminist philosophy, and the history of ideas. Previously, she hosted a hard-talk style political interview program on Georgian television, where she spoke with leading public figures and decision-makers. Asatiani holds an MPhil in Gender Studies from Central European University, a master’s degree in Media Studies from the University of Sussex, and a bachelor’s degree in Film Studies from Tbilisi State University. Before moving into journalism, she lectured at Tbilisi State University and worked as a DJ at a rock radio station in Tbilisi.

  • Zaal Andronikashvili

    Zaal Andronikashvili (Berlin) is a research fellow at the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies in Berlin and Professor at Ilia State University, Tbilisi. He studied History, Archeology, and German Philology in Tbilisi and Saarbrücken and completed his PhD at the University of Göttingen (2005) on Generation of Drama Text. Alongside his academic work, Andronikashvili has published essays on Georgian politics and culture in German outlets such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and is a regular contributor to Germany’s public-service broadcasting.

  • Harsha Ram

    Harsha Ram is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley. His recent publications chiefly concern Russian-Georgian, Russian-French, and Russian-Italian literary relations in the context of theories of world literature and comparative modernisms. He is currently completing a book on Russian-Georgian cultural relations titled The Geopoetics of Sovereignty: Literatures of the Russian-Georgian Encounter.

  • Karla Oeler

    Karla Oeler is Associate Professor in the Film and Media Studies Program at Stanford University. Her research and teaching interests are film history, theory and criticism, with emphases including the theory and practice of Sergei Eisenstein, cinematic representations of violence and thinking, and the relations between film aesthetics, literature, theory, and philosophy. Her work has appeared in numerous forums including Cinema Journal, The Journal of Visual Culture, and Slavic Review on a range of topics including works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Luc Godard, Sergei Parajanov, and Jean Renoir. She is currently writing a book called The Surface of Things: Cinema and Interiority.

  • Salomé Jashi

    Salomé Jashi (Tbilisi) is a filmmaker, activist, and Chairperson of DOCA (Documentary Association Georgia). She studied documentary filmmaking at Royal Holloway, University of London. Jashi’s Taming the Garden (2021) premiered at the Sundance Film Festival’s World Documentary Competition and the Berlinale Forum. She is the winner of the Berlin Art Prize (2024) and the KAIROS Prize (2024).

  • Anna Dziapshipa

    Anna Dziapshipa (Tbilisi) is a filmmaker, visual artist, and teacher with experience and a professional background in art history, film production, cultural management, experimental video, and documentary film; her latest work, Self-Portrait Along the Borderline, was awarded the Jury Prize in the Best Medium Feature Film Competition at the Visions du Réel. Her work often explores the transformation of physical boundaries into identities. Anna is a cofounder and board member of DOCA (Documentary Association Georgia), cofounder of the production company Sakdoc Film, initiator of the first documentary pitching forum for South Caucasian filmmakers PITCH.DOC, and a Fulbright Scholar (2022).

  • Elene Naveriani

    Elene Naveriani (Geneva) is a Georgian director based in Switzerland. They create films that explore hidden lives and give voice to marginalized communities, particularly contributing to queer cinema. Wet Sand (2022) premiered at the Locarno Film Festival and won Best Actor for its sensitive portrayal of love and loss. Most recently, Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival Director’s Fortnight, winning several awards, including the Swiss Cinema Prize. Naveriani is currently working on The Trial of Lilia Peradze and was recently awarded the Golden Queer Apple in recognition of their work in queer cinema.

  • Nino Orjonikidze

    Nino Orjonikidze (Tbilisi) is a documentary film director and producer, teacher, and commissioning editor of documentaries for Chai Docs (formerly part of Chai Khana Media), which represents independent filmmakers from the South Caucasus region. Orjonikidze graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London, and Tbilisi State University. Her films explore the human consequences of political, social, and environmental change through intimate, observational storytelling.

  • Polina Barskova

    Polina Barskova is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley. She is a scholar and a poet, author of thirteen collections of poems and three books of prose in Russian. She edited the Leningrad Siege poetry anthology Written in the Dark (UDP) and has four collections of poetry published in English translation: This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press), The Zoo in Winter (Melville House), Relocations (Zephyr Press), and AirRaid (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021). Barskova also authored a monograph Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, 2016) and multiple edited volumes on the culture of the besieged Leningrad.

  • Carmen Gray

    Carmen Gray (Berlin) is a freelance film critic and journalist from New Zealand who lives in Berlin and frequently writes about politics and the arts in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and the Balkans for The New York Times, Criterion’s The Current, Sight and Sound, and others. She is on the Berlinale selection committee and is Senior Programmer for the New Zealand International Film Festival.

Overview of the Symposium

Free and open to the public, this symposium offers an invaluable introduction to the current political and cultural context in the Republic of Georgia. Guest speakers will offer a range of perspectives, from analyzing the political situation under the current Georgian Dream government to sharing experiences from the field as activists on the frontlines fighting for civil liberties, especially freedom of speech and LGBTQ+ rights. We will hear from journalists, media commentators, cultural historians, teachers, and independent filmmakers on the challenges and threats they face as a result of the Georgian government’s introduction of the Foreign Agent Law—censorship, arrests, trials, and imprisonment—and parallels with broader global threats to democracy.

The symposium will feature two panels, “Modern Georgia’s Political History” and “Reports from the Field by Georgian Independent Filmmakers.” In between, we will screen two recent documentaries on the impact of the current authoritarian government.  

Panel 1: Modern Georgia’s Political History  

11:30 AM
Susan Oxtoby: Welcome    

11:35 AM
Karla Oeler: Introduction of the panelists  

11:45 AM
Salomé Asatiani: “Statecraft and Stagecraft: Frames from Georgian Politics and Culture”  

Georgia’s democracy is dismantled in the name of sovereignty, tradition and the family, by conjuring phantasms—“foreign agents,” “gender,” a geopolitical drama about sex. Power is out of focus: a billionaire with no office, government branches as scenery. The resemblance to a Russian textbook is uncanny: invent a decadent West, then try, grotesquely, to perform its opposite. This talk maps two democratic openings, one erased by Sovietization, one closing now—and how Georgian film, inventive and often defiant, answers still.    

12:10 PM
Zaal Andronikashvili: “The Unfinished Collapse of the Soviet World: Georgia as a Window onto New World Order”

In Western imaginaries, Georgia appears peripheral, its conflicts and authoritarian turn globally irrelevant. This talk argues the opposite: Georgia is exemplary, revealing the Soviet Union’s collapse as an unfinished, violent process that continues to shape Europe’s East. Three claims: this process began rather than ended in 1991; post-Soviet regimes inherited Soviet power structures; and post-Soviet oligarchies emerged from the fusion of Western market economics with Soviet kleptocracy rooted in the shadow economy—a fusion now feeding back into the West.

12:35 PM
Harsha Ram: Response    

12:45 PM
Roundtable discussion with Salomé Asatiani, Zaal Andronikashvili, and Harsha Ram, moderated by Karla Oeler

1 PM
Questions from the audience, moderated by Karla Oeler  

1:20–2 PM
Break  

2–2:45 PM  
Screening: Nino Orjonikidze will present two short films, including:  

A Review Lesson
Tamara Mshvenieradze (Georgia, 2026)  
The film follows the first days inside a university facing the threat of abolition under newly introduced reform, which brings a set of directives into university classrooms and laboratories, dictating what professors should teach, what students should learn, and what scientists should research. Ilia State University (Tbilisi) is the only state university making such a vocal stand in defense of academic freedom. As a result, it faces pressure, with the new reform threatening its very existence. Moving through lecture halls, laboratories, offices, and corridors, the film observes a community in a moment of profound uncertainty. Professors, scientists, administrators, students, and the rector face difficult choices, searching for a path between resistance and compromise while trying to preserve the idea of an independent university.

(27 mins, In Georgian with English subtitles, Color, DCP, From the artist)  

Panel 2: Reports from the Field by Georgian Independent Filmmakers  

2:45 PM
Susan Oxtoby: Welcome    

2:50 PM
Carmen Gray: Introduction of the panelists    

3 PM
Salomé Jashi: “Reports from the Frontlines: Activism by Georgian Independent Filmmakers Since 2022”  

Filmmaker Salomé Jashi examines the moment artistic creation collides with state power, forcing observation to transform into active resistance. Grounded in the censorship of her film Taming the Garden (2021), she traces how the urge to create freely led to founding DOCA - Documentary Association Georgia, a collective shelter for independent cinema. Navigating the delicate tension between the creative impulse and political necessity, Jashi reflects on artistic responsibility, instinctive action, and how shared artistic spaces can sustain creative freedom under authoritarian pressure.  

3:15 PM
Anna Dziapshipa: “Filmmaking in Uncertain Times: Georgian Culture Between Resistance and Solidarity”  

As a filmmaker and teacher, Anna Dziapshipa will speak about the recent changes and challenges for Georgian filmmakers and culture from a personal perspective. How threats to one’s freedom of expression change the attitude and the response of cultural practice. She will address the topic of censorship and the forms of resistance in an authoritarian regime in comparison to Ukraine and that nation’s war with Russia; and reflect upon what international support means in this situation.    

3:30 PM
Elene Naveriani in conversation with Carmen Gray: “Gesture in Cinema: On the Body and Forms of Resistance”  

Elene Naveriani, whose films are concerned with marginalized voices and communities in Georgia, will reflect upon their filmmaking process and use of gesture in cinema to express forms of resistance. They will comment on the challenges and benefits of making films while being based abroad and how that distance affects their perspective and relationship to Georgia.    

3:45 PM
Nino Orjonikidze: “Teaching Film in Times of Pressure: Media Education and Academic Freedom in Georgia”  

Drawing from her experience teaching documentary filmmaking for the past fifteen years in university and non-formal educational settings, both in Georgia and across the region, as well as her work as a documentary filmmaker and commissioning editor, Nino Orjonikidze examines how new higher education policy and shrinking independent funding are affecting academia and a new generation of filmmakers and journalists.    

4 PM
Polina Barskova: Response

4:10 PM
Roundtable discussion with Salomé Jashi, Anna Dziapshipa, Elene Naveriani, Nino Orjonikidze, Zaal Andronikashvili, and Polina Barskova, moderated by Carmen Gray  

4:35–5 PM
Questions from the audience, moderated by Carmen Gray 


BAMPFA’s film series Georgian Cinema Now: Part 1 features many in-person presentations by Georgian filmmakers and experts. 

Event Accessibility

If you have any questions about accessibility or need accommodations to attend this event, please contact us at bampfa@berkeley.edu or (510) 642-1412 (Wed–Sun, 11 AM–7 PM) as soon as you can. Advance notice helps us fulfill your request.

Learn more about accessibility services at BAMPFA.