Ever Since I Knew Myself review: a daughter interrogates her past

Maka Gogaladze's debut feature, Ever Since I Knew Myself, opens with an act of destruction. The Georgian film-maker recalls, through on-screen texts set against a stormy sky, the day she dumped all of her poems into the garbage as an adolescent. The impulsive gesture was aimed at her domineering mother. Gogaladze wanted her to feel guilty.

That anecdote, delivered over images of a rocky beach thrashed by crashing waves, sets the terms of the film. It is a work about the scars imprinted on impressionable young minds — scars, as the film argues, that can never fully fade away.

What does the daughter ask her mother?

The documentary's core consists of conversations between Gogaladze and her mother, filmed face to face. Gogaladze puts her in front of the camera and asks probing, at times blunt, questions about the strict education imposed on her in childhood.

The specifics are concrete:

• Piano lessons that ended in tears
• Tough academic exams that continued to haunt the director well into her adulthood
• A pattern of discipline the daughter now names directly

The two women's contrasting personalities emerge across these exchanges in all their tension. Yet the sequences also carry a different charge. They represent, in the review's assessment, a moving effort to reach across generational differences — a daughter and a mother still negotiating the terms of their history.

How does the film widen its view?

Gogaladze does not stop at her own family. She widens the frame to include a series of observational vignettes shot at various children's classes across Georgia.

The subjects vary widely:

• History lessons
• Ballet sessions
• Dance sessions
• Art class

The disciplined atmosphere remains the same in each setting. Even during art class, teachers leave little room for individual expression or debate. Obedience, rather than dialogue, is the order of the day.

Does the personal connect to the national?

The film's structure carries a risk. The transitions between Gogaladze's personal story and these external classroom sections can feel jarring. They require, as the review notes, extra layers of contextual information to bridge the two registers.

The payoff is ambition. The film shows it is interested in more than just education. Georgia is a nation that has undergone invasion numerous times, and it is perhaps understandable, the review suggests, that the country would place such an emphasis on collectivism.

That emphasis carries a cost. Under pressure to uphold a homogenous national identity, childlike wonder and innocence are in danger of being lost permanently — the film's quiet warning beneath its family portraits.

What is the takeaway?

Ever Since I Knew Myself works on two levels at once: a daughter's reckoning with her mother and a country's reckoning with how it raises its children. The film suggests the two are inseparable, and that the discipline meant to protect a national identity may be eroding the individuality it was meant to serve.

For a first-time feature director, blending intimate family interrogation with classroom observation marks Gogaladze as a film-maker willing to ask hard questions of both her household and her country — and to keep the camera rolling while her mother answers.