MY GRANDMOTHER

goEast opens in 2025 with a spectacular silent-film concert: the Finnish band Cleaning Women will be live-scoring the Georgian avant-garde film CHEMI BEBIA (1929). With its mixture of live-action, stop-motion animation and slapstick comedy, director Kote Mikaberidze's film takes a critical look at the omnipresent bureaucracy of a yet-young Soviet-Stalinist state apparatus. The film tells the story of an office worker's desperate search for a new position after having lost his job. He's been given a strange bit of advice: "Find yourself a grandmother!" Alas, instead of coming up with a solution, he finds himself lost in an absurd labyrinth of towering files, forms and senseless regulations. Banned in the Soviet Union for over four decades, MY GRANDMOTHER is a satirical takedown that has lost nothing of its bite in the intervening years. The experimental band CLEANING WOMEN, founded in Finland in 1996, will be providing musical accompaniment to the film. The three musicians – or, to put it better, robot tidying units CW01, CW03 and CW04) – create their striking soundscapes using self-made instruments made of recycled household objects. Their unique sound promises to lend the film an electrifying new dimension and make the screening an unforgettable experience.