Nutsa Gogoberidze

The opening images of bucolic nature are followed by a world of illness: “Even the trees have malaria”. And the young communists who take on this operation for sanitation find themselves in conflict with local superstitions. Many can’t imagine pitting themselves against Uzhmuri, the Queen of the Frogs who haunts the marshes. She is said to lead anybody who chances upon her territory down into the depths, where she forces them to marry her. Sadly, the film doesn’t show the Queen of the Frogs but instead a kulak; and after some breathtaking suspense, he is defeated.

This documentary film is about one of Georgia's regions - Racha. The title of the film is taken from the name of one of Racha's high mountain villages. It tells about the poorest in society living in the mountains and the rise of the SSSR. The product of a remarkable collaboration between the first Georgian female filmmaker and the leading Georgian avant-garde artist David Kakabadze.

The documentary Their Kingdom, co-directed in 1928 by Nutsa Gogoberidze and Mikhail Kalatozishvili (Kalatozov) for Soviet Georgia’s Cinema Trust, was considered lost until 2008, when there appeared a possibility that this important film – Georgia’s first documentary feature and Kalatozov’s directorial debut – had not disappeared irretrievably.