Khatia Nikabadze
Khatia Nikabadze is a documentary filmmaker and photographer based in Georgia. Her bachelor's degree is in Philosophy and a master's degree in Educational Psychology. For the last few years, she has been living and working in remote villages of Georgia, mostly in small communities that enable her to film and document relatively undiscovered features of their daily life. In 2018-2019 she lived in Javakheti, the southern part of Georgia, where she filmed one Doukhobor family.
Khatia Nikabadze is a finalist of the National Geographic Instagram photo contest “Natgeo100contest”, 2019. Her photograph was shortlisted in the One-Shot category at Kolga Tbilisi Photo Award, 2020.
She is the author of a short documentary Dasha produced for the Chai Khana media platform. Bread, Salt, and Water is another video story Khatia made for Open Media Hub in 2019.
Author's stories
Dasha, a strong and brave Doukhobor girl from Georgias southern Javakheti, recently graduated from high school and plans to move to capital Tbilisi to attend the university. This film is about a girl posed at the brink of adulthood; a young woman who loves her home but dreams of creating a new life.
Dasha
The end of 2020 in a small industrial community located between gold mines.
Kazreti is the largest mining settlement in Georgia. Most of the locals are employed in the mining industry and have no connection to the outside world unless something happens at the mines. Even the media never mentions them unless there’s a protest or a strike in Kazreti. So, almost no one knows anything about their everyday lives, how they see the world, and what they’re interested in. The documentary Christmas houses of Kazreti is a kind of a panorama where you can see different people sharing their wishes, dreams, goals, worries, and happiness.
Director's note:
“Historically, humanity has experienced devastating pandemics before. However, facing the coronavirus here and now was still a big revelation. In an instant, everyday life has turned upside down. From a larger perspective, one issue stood out to me - the way the state used the pandemic as a mechanism for controlling citizens and displaying its power. This intensified the existing sense of injustice in the population. Acts of social solidarity that followed were most striking. New opportunities for forging relationships and social bonds emerged. We assigned new meaning to compassion and caring for each other as citizens. In this strange and difficult year, it was particularly interesting for us as filmmakers to observe closely a small industrial town that is largely given to oblivion by the state outside of its mining strikes.”
Christmas houses of Kazreti
On March 21, the day of the spring equinox, millions follow a 3,000-year-old tradition and mark the new year.