Director: Lale Keyhani
Running time: 30mins
Search for Khubady is a film which professes to be about the fading memories of Ossetian culture within Georgia. Depending on who you ask, it may be fitting that it is conspicuously light on the details as to why those recollections of language and art are disappearing in the first place.
Lale Keyhani’s short documentary opens and closes with an unspecified voice (I would guess a family member who lives in South Ossetia, who she has been unable to visit amid the aftermath of the 2008 Russia-Georgia war). The voice asserts that Keyhani should be able to see the speaker in a window, somewhere in a photograph we are never shown. At another point, it goes into detail about a photo of the pair of them in the desert – a happy memory, a precious day which both know happened, but again it is not shown to the audience, as it has been hidden by the sweep of personal and political history.
I would argue that on this basis, Search for Khubady works as a deeply moving piece of introspective cinema – noting that we are doomed to lose easy sight of even the most precious of memories in the end. Even if warring nation states don’t sever us from the human beings who allow us to ground ourselves in those moments, the limitations of our minds and bodies mean sooner or later, the imagery will be irretrievably obscured from us.
On another basis, however, the film is fighting with itself. It works better as an examination of memory, than of history or culture, but it presents as an exploration of both. Coming out of this film, however, I am none the wiser of anything to do with the geopolitical and social tensions at play around the protracted separation of Georgia and South Ossetia.
Keyhani, and a small crew of filmmakers, venture into rural Georgia, in search of a particular folk song. It is not immediately clear why Khubady is so important to them – the connection of Keyhani to Ossetian culture remains unspoken and obscured, and whether it is of personal significance for her is left to our own speculation. Without a grounding in Georgian social history, it is also unclear why she searches for it in the places she does.
Ossetians are ethnic group, speaking an Indo-Iranian language, spread across the regions around the Caucasus mountains. Their population is most concentrated in North Ossetia – a region within the Russian Federation – and the disputed South Ossetia, to the north of Georgia, which claims independence, but is also recognised by the United Nations as being occupied by Russia since 2008. However, demonstrating the arbitrary nature of any system of borders, Ossetians still live across Georgia, as they have done for centuries.
While that might be context Keyhani’s immediate periphery is well aware of, that will not be the case for general audiences. So, while many of us might have a vague recollection of the 2008 war – and its spectre looms large in the background of this film – that is most of what we have to draw on. So, when we are in villages like Ninigori or Lagodekhi – in the east of Georgia, far from South Ossetia – it is hard for us to accurately understand why Keyhani expects to find someone there who could sing Khubady.
When villagers note that the Ossetians who lived there have been unable to stay, following the war, the assumption may well be (incorrectly) that we are on the border of South Ossetia. But actually, it seems that there has been some unspoken violence which has swept through the whole country. Ethnic cleansing of Georgians in South Ossetia has been noted since 2008, and Keyhani’s camera later finds itself in Tserovani, a place where those refugees now live (also without context) – but there seems to be a hinting at the equivalent also occurring in rural Georgia here. This is an interesting and important story to be told – a vital exploration of the way violence and oppression in this conflict has spread and metastasised in a way which the easy categorisation of national borders has utterly obscured. But without being willing to more explicitly walk us through any of it, there is a danger it will be lost on many viewers. That would be a great pity.
To some extent, all of this is forgivable. On one level, all of this is an utter powder-keg, and I can imagine that any attempt to address it with narration would need to be delivered with extreme care. That might be too much to ask for what is, at the end of the day, a student film. At the same time, because the subject and format of the film may be enough to intrigue people into doing their own research, and forming their own conclusions about what they have been told. It certainly did that in my case.
But on the other hand, trying to place films in a social and political context, to recommend to audiences, is literally my job. There will be some people who do not respond to the call to do their own homework, and I would argue that it is incumbent on a film with such an important message to try and reach them more directly. To inform them with the historical and social contexts at play. To explain why the things at the heart of this film matter – and matter beyond the edge of the frame, in our own lives far beyond the borders of Georgia and South Ossetia.
Lale Keyhani should be praised for taking this subject on at all. While it clearly matters to her, it is also something which many filmmakers would sooner avoid, because of the potential backlash their efforts might prompt. And whether or not I feel it does enough to make its historical and cultural themes clear to an uninitiated audience, the sense of uncanny that it serves up relating to memory frames a tricky subject in a way which may mean many people who would have been hostile to the direct approach are more capable of listening to what is being said. When our annual student short film showcase comes around again at the end of the year, I will be happy to recommend this film to viewers around the world. But I would encourage anyone going into it to make sure they do their reading around the subject matter first, to maximise the experience.