"One detail was interesting: how representatives of the Russian intelligentsia worked to release the film. The movie could not be seen in Moscow while it was “under arrest”. Rezo Chkheidze was supposed to go to Moscow and receive the Order of Lenin for the film “Earth, This Is Your Son”. He packed “Repentance” in these boxes, wrote “Earth, This Is Your Son” on it, and took it to Moscow. There, he brought the film directly to Elem Klimov in the movie house, where they watched 'imprisoned' films. A 5-member commission evaluated the film, and Klimov said that he would risk his life to see this film on the screen. Then, he told me how many bureaucrats' rooms he had to go through to save the film. He informed the secretary of the Central Committee of the Union that the release of this film would be a sign that the Cold War was over and the world map was changing. He did everything, went to the wives of the secretaries of the Central Committee, who could not believe the content of the film. Yegor Ligachyov was considered a serious threat, but he turned out to be a victim of repressions, and the film was a personal story for him as well. There was a big movement to save this film, and everyone worked hard to get the green light for the movie”.
“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”.
Nana Janelidze was born on August 7, 1955 in Tbilisi. Her father was the secretary of the Komsomol of Georgia, who left politics after the tragedy of March 1956 and continued to work in the academic field. Mother was a successful chemist and the author of many unique inventions in her field. Nana herself became a film director and in 1984 she participated in the shooting of Tengiz Abuladze‘s famous anti-Soviet film, „Repentance“, where she wrote the script. The film was finally released in 1986 and won several awards at the Cannes Film Festival.
Filming a movie like „Repentance“ was associated with great risks. Nana Janelidze started collecting stories from living witnesses, predominantly women – wives, children, and sisters of the repressed, often individuals who themselves had returned from exile. Despite the film‘s eventual release and success, Nana Janelidze and Tengiz Abuladze harbored negative expectations before the collapse of the Soviet Union, fearing possible arrest.
After the collapse of the USSR, Nana Janelidze continued her work in cinema, creating many memorable films. One of her recent works, „Lisa, go on,“ which explores the war in Abkhazia, received mixed reactions from Georgian society. Despite the complexities, Janelidze maintains that she would not alter anything in her career. She emphasizes the need for history to be written without ideological constraints, advocating for liberation from such chains.
