Nana Janelidze ნანა ჯანელიძე

“We didn't have dissident literature; it didn't exist in Georgia. I remember being greatly impressed by the memories of Osip Mandelstam's wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, about the peaceful life outside the prison, that is, outside the concentration camp - or how cultural figures lived. I was very impressed by the stress they were under, the persecution they were going through. This was the first book. I had read Solzhenitsyn, but it was the first book about what was happening in the Soviet Union itself. When we started working on the script, I realized that it was important for this material to be authentic, Georgian. It turned out that there was a lot of such material. In fact, every second family was repressed. We started collecting stories from living witnesses, which was very interesting because the respondents were mostly women whose husbands were shot. These women were the wives of the “enemy of the people”, and most of them were exiled to the concentration camp themselves. They told us their stories, so what happens in our film is a collection of patterns from many different histories”.

“A true belief in communist ideas and a great deal of patriotism were strangely combined and blended in him. He established the magazine “Tsiskari”. Also, he actively supported the creation of the ensemble "Shvidkatsa" under the leadership of Jano Kakhidze. Additionally, when the tragedy of 1956 unfolded, he was the secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol. He later told me about the rescue of these children. He said that everything was absurd because the investigators who questioned these little children, the students who came forward to defend Stalin, themselves had pictures of Stalin hanging on their walls. He immediately explained to me that it was a small nation's national protest when Khrushchev declared that Stalin was a fool and couldn't even read a map, effectively breaking the Stalin cult”.