“A Permanent Civil War in the Body”: How the Fight against Cancer Helped the Artist Understand His Soviet Youth | Berlin Film Festival 2026

IIn the fall of 2022, Giorgi Jagoshidze was in the middle of producing a documentary about the disintegration of the Soviet Union when he witnessed the collapse of his personal regime. After returning from filming in Tbilisi to Berlin, where the 42-year-old Georgian artist lives, he was suffering from shortness of breath. X-rays revealed that his lungs were filled with water. He was asked to take a taxi to the Charité Hospital in the German capital immediately if he wanted to live.

Gagoshidze was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoma, a rare, aggressive and fast-growing form of blood cancer in an advanced but treatable stage. A brutal combination of chemotherapy followed by an eight-month hospital stay in isolation was his only chance of survival.

“Everything just collapsed,” he recalls. “And the art world is very cruel. It can eat you up faster than cancer.”

However, this week, just three years after his diagnosis, Jagoshidze’s documentary, Graft Versus Host, will premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. It is only 31 minutes long, yet it is packed with insights, archival footage, personal reflections, and DIY computer graphics in a style reminiscent of English documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis or German video essayist Hito Steyerl, whom Gagoshidze studied at Berlin’s University of the Arts.

Visually chaotic, its historical vision is remarkably clear. Because although cancer physically immobilized him, his diagnosis also opened his mind to understand events in the Eastern Bloc during his life in new ways. “My treatment plan accurately reflects the collapse of the Soviet Union and the post-transition plan,” he says.

In Jagoshidze’s chosen city, the process of post-1989 economic reintegration between the two Germanys is often framed in terms of the annexation of the socialist East with the capitalist West – one popular book on the subject was titled “The Takeover.” But from Georgia, the transition from one regime to another appears more complex.

In 1973, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Georgia Eduard Shevardnadze launched an economic experiment in the western village of Abacha, where farmers were allowed to keep part of their surplus crop yield or sell it for personal gain.

“While the economy was declining, the Communist Party was looking for ways to stimulate the workforce and decided to introduce a limited form of ownership,” Jagoshidze says.

The Abacha experiment was a success: the village’s agricultural production increased significantly and the problem of food shortages was solved, which led to administrative reforms throughout Georgia and strengthened the reformist image of Shevardnazy, who later became Foreign Minister under Mikhail Gorbachev.

When Jagoshidze interviewed Abacha in Georgia, he found that not only officials, but also his relatives, were still nostalgic for the country’s former status as the economic vanguard of the Eastern Bloc.

Yet, at the same time, he says, “Abacha paved the way for the collapse of the Soviet Union,” by creating a new breed of illegal enterprises with access to state-run facilities. known as tsekhoviksThese underground entrepreneurs built an economic system that remained dependent on corruption. This meant that when the Soviet system collapsed, it could not be reformed step by step, but was transformed directly into a powerful form of capitalism.

“When the Soviet Union collapsed, everything collapsed,” he recalls. “I remember one day my mom took me to the supermarket and all the necessities were there. The next time she took me, she had to beg the staff for anything edible at all, because the shelves were empty. And then we came home and there was no gas, no hot water, nothing.”

In Graft Versus Host, Gagoshidze likens this moment to his own course of radiotherapy. “Introducing a new immune system into the host is only viable when cancer cells are successfully suppressed, just as transformation requires complete privatization of the function of the proposed new economic system,” he says.

His treatment came in three steps, and eliminating the cancer cells in his system was the easy part. The most difficult procedure was to introduce a new immune system – via a bone marrow transplant – and for his body to adapt to the system.

Gagoshidze received a bone marrow transplant from his father, which meant the tissue type was only half identical to his own and led to the disease that gave his film its name, graft-versus-host disease or GvHD, in which the newly transplanted immune system begins to fight the recipient.

“It’s like a perpetual civil war in the body,” he says. The medicine was crucial to stopping the fighting. “The role of the drug was to keep my new immune system dizzy so it wouldn’t kill me. But the post-Soviet countries had no drug to stop the immune system from fighting with itself: we had an immune system transplant without any form of regulation.”

More than three decades later, the country is still stuck in the adjustment phase. “Nowadays, Georgian farmers are free to keep all the money they earn from their businesses themselves, but they no longer have state-supplied technology and equipment, and they have to find new markets for their crops outside Georgia.”

The country broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991 and gained EU candidate status in 2023, but its bid was effectively halted a year later due to sharp democratic backsliding. The former model reformers are at the back of the queue. “It’s a never-ending vicious cycle, a constant state of catching up but never arriving,” Jagoshidze says. “It’s a vicious cycle.”

His personal situation seems more optimistic, at least. The artist’s graft-versus-host disease was relatively mild, and doctors told him that if his health remained stable until the fall, he could consider himself cured. “Doctors are happy, and if they are happy, I am happy.”