Film short abstract:

A State in a State is an experimental documentary that follows the processes of construction, disruption, and fragmentation of railroads in the South Caucasus. Tracing the history of one railway, the BTK line, it maps the multiple borders that have emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Film long abstract:

A State in a State (47’, 2022) directed by Tekla Aslanishvili and developed through an artistic-scientific collaboration with Dr Evelina Gambino is an experimental documentary that looks at the ongoing conflicts in the South Caucasus through the lens of transport infrastructures. The film focuses on the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway to tell a larger story about the dislocations of warfare, labour, finance and national imaginations that have intersected in the region in the past three decades. Looking at historic and current practices of identity formation and resistance, A State in a State maps the forms of infrastructural consciousness that travel along railways and the lasting, transnational, kinship among the people who live and work around them.

Based on several years of ethnographic research in different localities along the BTK, the film patches together a multivocal account of life in the proximity of this railway. Infrastructures allow us to tell ethnographic stories without limiting the scale of narration, in doing so they make visible different forms of connectivity that bind together the territories they cross. Similarly, by piecing together fragmented accounts from different sites along the present route of the BTK, and connecting them with the memories of those who witnessed previous versions of this railway, A State in A State shows how the making and remaking of infrastructure has challenged, altered, and at times destroyed existing notions of economic, political, national, and regional geographical relations.