SUBJECTS

Bureaucracy -- Soviet Union -- Drama, Political corruption -- Soviet Union -- Drama

My Grandmother

(Moya babushka), (Chemi bebia)

BAMPFA Collection Print

featuring

Aleksandre Takaishvili, Bella Chernova, E. Obanov,

Gogol meets Charlie Chaplin in this riotous, scathingly antibureaucratic satire. My Grandmother is a genuine piece of grotesquerie descended from the Soviet Eccentric Cinema (FEKS) of the twenties. For invention, it matches any film of the French avant-garde, taking in all kinds of advanced filmic devices such as stop-motion, bits of puppetry, and animation, as well as expressionist decor and camera angles. The energetic music track will have you dancing a Soviet-style Charleston along with the film’s most memorable character, a wide-eyed, wild-haired bureaucrat’s wife who is caught up in a frenzy of bourgeois living. Her equally comic husband personifies the indolence, irrelevance, and obduracy of a state system that resembles nothing so much as a giant scoreboard, winding down. When he loses his job, he learns the true value of a “grandmother”—a slang term for the patronage and privilege that keep the machine greased. What are we to think when, at the film’s end, he is reprimanded by a Lenin-like worker, shot from the ground so that he looks ten feet tall? Suppressed for half a century, this irreverent blast has lost none of its immediacy.

FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Kote Mikaberidze
  • Giorgi Mdivani
  • Siko Dolidze
Cinematographer
  • Anton Polikevich
  • Vladimir Poznan
Language
  • Russian
  • Russian intertitles with English electronic titling
Print Info
  • B&W
  • 35mm
  • Silent
  • 65 mins
Source
  • BAMPFA
CINEFILES

CineFiles is an online database of BAMPFA's extensive collection of documentation covering world cinema, past and present.

View Moya babushka (My grandmother) documents  

Beth Custer presents My grandmother (distributor materials), Beth Custer Ensemble, 2005

My grandmother (intertitles), 2002

The Beth Cluster Ensemble provides live musical accompaniment to Kote Mikaberidze's My grandmother (press kit), Larsen Associates, 2002

Moya babushka (program note), San Francisco International Film Festival, Judy Bloch, 1991

Soviet Georgian cinema : My grandmother (program note), Pacific Film Archive Calendar, Judy Bloch, 1991

Moya babushka (review), Variety, David Stratton, 1989

Archival treasutes of the silent screen -- Soviet Georgian films in the PFA collection : Kote Mikaberidze's My grandmother (program note), Pacific Film Archive Calendar, Judy Bloch, 1986

A Georgian eccentric : Kote Mikaberidze : My grandmother (program note), Pacific Film Archive Calendar, Judy Bloch, 1985

My grandmother and In spring (program note), Pacific Film Archive Calendar, Judy Bloch, 1981

Moya babushka (program note), New York Film Festival, 1977

Displaying 10 of 13 publicly available documents.


View all Moya babushka (My grandmother) documentation on CineFiles.