Through beautiful and intimate camerawork, filmmaker Yana Ugrekhelidze illuminates the shadows where many LGBTQ+ people must still reside within their home countries, centering on Alexander, a transgender man forced to live clandestinely in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. 

With no way to change the gender on his passport, Alexander is denied access to a proper job and even professional medical care. Despite such obstacles, his secret life is not one of solitude, living with his doting partner of nearly a decade, Marie—a cis woman—and surrounded by a warm, supportive family who have understood and protected him since childhood.

Winner of the Teddy Jury Award at this year's Berlin International Film Festival, Instructions for Survival is an exquisite and timely documentary portrait featuring outstanding filmmaking craft and a profoundly honest window into one couple’s struggle to live openly.


Alexander’s existence in the margins is untenable. With candour and empathy, Ugrekhelidze follows the couple as they consider seeking asylum in another country—a drastic step that might only be financed if Marie becomes a surrogate mother. In its quietly powerful and deeply humane way, Instructions for Survival captures both the heartbreak and profound joy of ordinary love in extraordinary circumstances.


Instructions for Survival

Arriving in Paris, I start learning two languages, French and drawing. In an artist's studio, I meet Linda Demorrir, a live model. Like me, she is transgender and an immigrant. As I draft her outlines, it is also myself that I learn to draw.

The Sketch

 is a portrait of Silver Platter, a historic bar on the east side of Los Angeles that has catered to the Latin immigrant and queer community since 1963. With a touch of magical realism, the bar itself becomes a character in the film. Voiced by a transgender actress from Guatemala, it whispers the histories of the LGBT community from whom it has provided sanctuary and "safe space" for generations. 

The film captures the creativity that ensues when a group of young queer artists( Wu Tsang, Dj NGUZUNGUZU and Total Freedom) organise a weekly a performance party, also called Wildness, at the bar. This emergent underground interfaces with the emigrant trans women who have long populated the venue and the Silver Platter becomes a charged forum for forging coalitions and exploring class, community and activism.

Wildness

The artist, Anuka Ramischwili-Schäfer has been putting together an archive of their great grandfather’s documents: he was a Georgian Marxist economist executed by Stalin in the purges of the 1930s. The film looks at some of his documents, including the execution papers, alongside a poetic essay on the Caucasus/West Asia/the objectification of the post Soviet.

This is an introduction to a longer piece that is still in the works, which began as a metadata and digitisation research project as part of their Librarianship Masters.

Categories

Immigration