As we see in Anna Khazaradze’s Berliner, selected for DOK Preview Germany 2026, Nana, 63, is a force of nature, a woman who has spent more than three decades in Berlin, carrying within her the Tbilisi she left behind.
At the refugee arrival centre, she translates for Georgian and other post-Soviet asylum seekers, offering care, arguing and sometimes crossing professional boundaries. Away from work, her kitchen, train journeys and familiar cafés hold a life shaped by two cities. Through her voice, photographs and archives, memories of Georgia unfold alongside the present.
“The film’s strongest foundation is the trust I have built with Nana over more than six years,” producer/director Anna Khazaradze tells Business Doc Europe. “That relationship allows me to stay close to her as her life and surrounding changes in both Tbilisi and Berlin. The story is set in Berlin but brings a Georgian perspective to it,” she adds. The film will detail Nana’s present-day experiences in Berlin alongside with archives of Tbilisi from the 1980s and 1990s.
“Berliner follows a woman who has spent decades interpreting other people’s experiences as she gradually begins to narrate her own,” Khazaradze emphasises the very human story at the heart of the film. “Through Nana’s public work and private memories, the film explores belonging, migration and translation, not only between languages, but between cities, generations and different periods of history. It observes the possibilities of care while confronting its limits: what one person can carry for others, what cannot be translated and what remains when the systems around her begin to change.”
“My experience as a producer has given me practical knowledge of international co-production, financing and festival distribution,” she adds of her business savvy in bringing the project to market, despite the non-availability of Georgian public funding. Berliner is a co-production between Georgian AK Films and Germany’s ma.ja.de.
At Leipzig, Khazaradze is looking for the right partners “for the film’s next stage,” especially a world sales partner who connects with its “intimate, observational approach.”
“The film connects directly with Georgian and German audiences, while its themes of migration, belonging and care are very universal themes,” Khazaradze underlines the appeal to financiers and audiences alike.
“Berliner combines observational filmmaking with a more subjective layer of memory, carried by protagonistsvoice and archival images of Tbilisi,” she further describes the visual look of the film, which is at late production stage.
“The archival material introduces the city and time the main character carries in her memory. Tbilisi in the 1980s and 1990s appears alongside observational present-day Berlin, connected through Nana’s recollections and associations. I am developing this as a parallel strand, allowing the past to interrupt or accompany the present rather than presenting her life as a chronological biography,” Khazaradze signs off.
