Marginalised history is reclaimed for collective memory with a poetic feel for atmosphere and an undercurrent of urgent political concern in Mariam Chachia and Nik Voigt’s Magic Mountain.
Screening at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam in the Best of Fests section, the haunting, evocatively shot doc should continue to enjoy wide festival play, rich as it is in ideas about place as a site for power imagined and belonging contested. It traces the changing fortunes of a monumental building, standing isolated in the mountains of southwest Georgia, that served as a tuberculosis sanatorium through the eras of the Romanov tsardom, Soviet Union and capitalism, before its fading grandeur succumbs finally to the aggressions of modern-day acquisition.
The film is largely observational, drawing us into the world-out-of-time feel of the sanatorium. Its inhabitants, who seem forgotten or at least hidden away from society, pass meandering days playing backgammon or drinking together, routines marked by little other than the changing of seasons and scheduled taking of medication. There is a sense of trust-based rapport built up between the patients and film crew and personal investment over five years of intermittent shooting. Co-director Chachia is frequently in the frame, chatting to residents about their situations and even romantic aspirations. The title and surreal sense of temporal drift as the camera traverses the battered hallways inevitably bring to mind Thomas Mann’s twentieth-century lit classic of near-mystical absurdity set in a Swiss alpine sanatorium, The Magic Mountain. Both share a vision, albeit the doc on a more modest scale, of the sanatorium as a barometer for wider sickness and political paroxysms in the history of Europe at large.
A surfeit of looseness as we are immersed in the aimless days of the inhabitants is wisely avoided through beautifully scripted but unobtrusive narration, which forefronts how public and private architecture intersect with power. Chachia recalls in voice-over how she contracted tuberculosis herself when younger and recovered, avoiding a stay in the mountain sanatorium of Abustami, which took in only those resistant to antibiotics. But she continued to have nightmares about the place, which loomed as a threat in the popular imagination. Tuberculosis was considered shameful in a Soviet Union that, according to propaganda, was home to no poor, violent or ill people; those who did not conform were prone to disappear from view.
The narrator addresses Abastumani directly, as if it were a living entity, adding to an atmosphere that is thick with the past. The history of the building’s founding is, in its retelling, fascinating. It was constructed in the middle of a forest after George, the third son of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia’s Romanov family, was diagnosed with TB. In India, it was prophesied that he would be healed on a magic mountain in the Caucasus. He did recover — only to be killed by skiing into a tree before he left. Though his body was returned to Russia, his heart was removed and buried in Abustami.
There is a sense that, as a custodian and physical remnant of the historical events that have occurred in and around its walls, the sanatorium is indeed a receptacle of existence. It is also in need of protection, especially when a prospective sale to an oligarch is touted in the film’s final third, conjuring the spectre of imminent bulldozers as mortality comes not only for the patients but the gargantuan structure itself. In recording the eventual fate of the sanatorium, as it becomes the property of one of Georgia’s most influential men and the residents are unceremoniously moved out of the medical facility that has become a home to them over the years, the film bears echoes of Taming the Garden (2021). Acclaimed and widely played abroad but politically controversial and suppressed at home, it is Georgian documentarian Salome Jashi’s portrait of unlimited and unchecked buying power run amok, in the form of a billionaire and founder of the ruling Georgian Dream party who goes to absurd lengths to uproot and transport centuries-old trees to his private garden. Magic Mountain powerfully suggests that Abustami’s ghosts and the fears stoked around tuberculosis and otherness have been replaced by a new nightmare, in which Georgia’s history and heritage is for sale.
Directors, screenwriters, editors: Mariam Chachia, Nik Voigt
Cinematography: Nik Voigt
Sound Design: Sebastian Zsemlye
Music: Paul Fothergill
Producer: Mariam Chachia
Production companies: OpyoDoc, TVP – Polish Public Television
Venue: IDFA
In Georgian, Russian
74 minutes
