Self-Portrait Along the Borderline

In her 1932 painting Self-Portrait Along the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States, artist Frida Kahlo positions herself on a boundary stone with the backdrops of the two eponymous countries on either side of her.

But for Anna Dziapshipa’s ranging documentary, the political and geographical divides are somewhat more complex and fragmentary. Born in Tiblisi to a Georgian mother and Abkhazian father, she has always had a complicated relationship with her identity and her surname. Her heritage became cause for anxiety during the conflict between Georgia and the unrecognised state of Abkhazia. Using a road trip to an abandoned family home as its basis, the film explores the geopolitical relations between the two nations from the perspective of someone attempting to balance two sides of their own identity. A prize-winner in the short and medium-length film competition at Visions du Reél, it now competes in the documentary section at this year’s Sarajevo Film Festival.

Throughout this essayistic study, Dziapshipa returns to the motif of a house spider, a creature whose web is both its home and a tool for hunting – a trap. This duality recurs as she attempts to construct her own sense of a home, most obviously through the return to the abandoned holiday home, itself laden with cobwebs. The way that the filmmaker weaves this imagined landscape is through a constantly shifting collage of found footage, archival home videos, and newly shot material. Eschewing direct imagery from the war itself (which ran from 1992-93) but utilising soundscapes that evoke it, Dziapshipa engages in various ways with the more insidious implications of the long-term ethnic tensions.

Early on in the film her voiceover reels off a list of mispronunciations of her surname, citing the way it sounds like a mistake to Georgian ears. Later, some ostensibly innocent footage from a school recital is accompanied by audio of political speech in which the country is urged to deport non-Georgian groups. Shortly afterwards, the recital is revealed to include lyrics about not letting ‘the soulless stranger destroy my language.’ Against these threads of strain, images of Abkhazia are presented, at times representing in Dziapshipa’s own words, a kind of ‘Paradise Lost.’ It is this highly subjective perspective that gives Self-Portrait Along the Borderline its significance. The filmmaking deftly blends the private and public in relation to the Georgia-Abkhazia situation to brilliantly convey the intricate emotions of the former and, as a result, a far more powerful rumination on the latter.

Director, cinematography, sound: Anna Dziapshipa
Producers: Anna Dziapshipa, Nike Mikadze
Editing: Eka Tsotsoria
Sound design: Paata Godziashvili
Music: Nika Paniashvili
Production: Sakdoc Film, Murman Original Pictures LLC (Georgia)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Competition Programme – Documentary Film)
In Georgian, Russian
50 minutes