Self-Portrait Along the Borderline

Anna Dziapshipa’s surname is so rarely pronounced correctly that she can remember every time it happened. This daughter of a Georgian mother and Abkhaz father is the child of two countries—with a name that has no home.

At the heart of this autobiographical essay film lies the search for a house that Dziapshipa left 23 years ago. The house lies in Abkhazia, a Black Sea coastal region. It declared independence in 1994, but its nationhood goes unrecognized by most of the world—and Georgians are forbidden from going there. The house symbolizes Dziapshipa’s disconnection from her roots; the fracture running through her identity. The door of the house opens onto a long-inaccessible past.

The film transcends the purely personal through a multilayered montage of archival footage that reflects on a national identity scarred and cleaved by war. The recurring image of a spider in its web underscores the interconnectedness of the political and the personal, the individual and the collective.