Forum & Friends VII: Georgia. Moments on the edge of the abyss

Over the course of three evenings, Forum & Friends VII presents documentary films from Georgia, produced between the late 1980s and the early 2000s; these largely unknown cinematic-essayistic reflections compare the ongoing political violence of those in power against their own people with the decades of upheaval and transformation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Each of the three program blocks —“Merab Mamardashvili: Thinking in the abyss,” “Fragile freedom,” and “Conscience/struggle”— will be preceded by a clip from the “Prisoners of Conscience” series produced in 2025 by the Georgian Film Institute with renowned Georgian directors.

“History is the drama of freedom—there are no guarantees in it, no mechanism that advances it on its own. Every moment is surrounded by chaos. If one loses the tension of thought, one falls into the abyss—and this abyss is not somewhere else; it surrounds us now, at this very moment.” This is how, at the end of the 1980s, the Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili (1930–1990) described a present, whose fragility is once again becoming tangible today. In a Soviet Union that still appeared stable to the outside world, he interpreted the workings of totalitarian ideology not simply as the rule of a political apparatus, but as the slow erosion of consciousness, as the surrender of the individual's capacity to think: freedom is neither a possession nor a historical automatism. (Barbara Wurm, Zaal Andronikaschvili)