Maka Gogaladze Confronts Her Mother – and Georgia's Classroom Discipline

By Daniel Okafor

Georgian film-maker Maka Gogaladze opens her debut feature with a confession: as an adolescent, she threw all of her poems into the garbage. The anecdote appears in on-screen text against a stormy sky, over a rocky beach thrashed by crashing waves. It was a gesture of rebellion, she recalls – aimed squarely at her domineering mother.

The film, Ever Since I Knew Myself, then does something bolder. Gogaladze puts that same mother in front of the camera and asks probing, at times blunt, questions about the strict education imposed on her in childhood. Together they revisit piano lessons that ended in tears and academic exams that haunted the director well into adulthood.

The pairing works. Their contrasting personalities emerge across the conversations in all their tension, and the sequences read as a moving effort to reach across generational differences. A family argument, filmed. It shouldn't be this absorbing, but it is.

What happens when the frame widens?

Gogaladze doesn't stop at the kitchen-table interrogation. She expands the film into a series of observational vignettes shot at various children's classes across Georgia. The subjects vary:

• history lessons
• ballet sessions
• dance classes
• art class

The disciplined atmosphere does not. Even in art class, teachers leave little room for individual expression or debate. Obedience, rather than dialogue, is the order of the day – and Gogaladze's camera registers it without commentary.

Is this about more than education?

Yes, and the film knows it. Georgia has undergone invasion numerous times, and the review's assessment suggests it is perhaps understandable that the nation places such an emphasis on collectivism. Under pressure to uphold a homogeneous national identity, however, childlike wonder and innocence stand in danger of being lost permanently. That is the film's quiet, uncomfortable thesis.

The seams show. At times, the transition between Gogaladze's personal story and these external sections feels jarring, requiring extra layers of contextual information to bridge the two registers. The private wound and the national pattern don't always sit comfortably in the same frame.

Still, the film's central image lingers: a mother and daughter, decades of grievance between them, talking – sometimes bluntly, sometimes tenderly – about how the scars imprinted on impressionable young minds can never fully fade away. Gogaladze once destroyed her poems to make her mother feel guilty. Her debut feature does the opposite: it builds something from the wreckage, and suggests a filmmaker worth watching as she moves from first-person testimony toward broader social observation.