EUROPEAN PREMIERE
My Grandmother (Chemi Bebia)

Maltings cinema
Monday 24 18.30

USSR, 1929, 65min
Black & white, 35mm
Silent
With accompanying live performance by the Beth Custer Ensemble

dir: Kote Mikaberidze
scr: Siko Dolidze, Giorgi Mdivani, Kote
Mikaberidze
dop Anton Polikevick, Vladimir Poznan
prod. Irakli Gamrekeli, Valerian Sidamom- design: Eristavi
music: Beth Custer (recorded and released
in 2005)
cast: Aleqsandre Takaishvili, Bella Chernova, E. Ovanov.

production company: Sakhkinmretsvi
print source: NFA/BFI

Banned for nearly half a century, My Grandmother is a classic example of the Soviet Eccentric Cinema movement of the 1920s. The film is a scathing satire on the excesses of bureaucracy, which were already dominating the Soviet system even in the early days of Stalinism. The film follows the foibles and follies that abound when a Georgian paper pusher, modelled after the American silent comic Harold Lloyd, loses his job. This news is greeted with annoyance by his bourgeois free-spending wife, who dramatically kicks him out of their house. He spends the rest of the film trying to secure a ‘grandmother’, a slang term for the use of influence and privilege in the process of finding new employment. When eventually he does get a recommendation from an acquaintance, he is rejected by ‘the representative of the workers’, followed by proclamations of ‘death to bureaucrats and red tape’ – perhaps explaining the reaction to the film by the authorities of the time.

My Grandmother is noted for its combination of comedy slapstick with an anarchic and experimental style, including stop-motion, puppetry, exaggerated camera angles, animation and angular constructivist sets. The film, which is based on the screenplay by Siko Dolidze, was greatly influenced by the aesthetics of FEKS (the Factory of the Eccentric Actor) founded in Petrograd in 1922 by a group of radical artists who championed the blending of Russian revolutionary culture with the jazz age.

In 2003, San Francisco-based musician Beth Custer was commissioned to write a score for the film. The resulting soundtrack incorporates a variety of influences, including jazz, folk, blues and contemporary classical music, reflecting the FEKS love of American culture, especially jazz. The work is performed live, both from score and improvised, by an eight-piece ensemble which faces the screen while playing. The Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival is delighted to welcome the Beth Custer Ensemble to perform at the screening of My Grandmother on the first date of their European tour.

The score for My Grandmother was originally commissioned by the Pacific Film Archive through an NEA grant and revised under a
Meet The Composer New Residency grant. The original recording (available on BC Records) was made possible in part by the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc. The European tour is being partially funded by a Trust of Mutual Understanding award and a US Artists International Award.

Beth Custer is a San Francisco-based composer, performer, bandleader, clarinet teacher and the proprietor of BC Records. She is a founding member of the notorious silent-film soundtrack purveyors, the Club Foot Orchestra, and currently leads the Beth Custer Ensemble. Beth composes for film, television, installations and the concert stage. Recent commissions include A Trip Down Market Street 1905/2005, The Ballad of Pancho & Lucy, a musical for Campo Santo Theatre, and Bernal Heights Suite, for the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble.