Maka Gogaladze opens Ever Since I Knew Myself on a rocky Georgian coastline, waves crashing, and an act of teenage sabotage rendered in on-screen text: she threw her poems in the garbage to make her mother feel guilty. It's a smart opening move — intimate, a little absurd, and quietly devastating — because it establishes immediately that the film is about the strange violence of love operating through discipline. The film's core is a series of conversations between Gogaladze and her mother, who sits in front of the camera with the full knowledge that her parenting is being interrogated. Piano lessons that ended in tears. Academic exams that haunted the director into adulthood. The tension here is not performed or editorial — it emerges from two people who clearly love each other and cannot quite bridge the gap between the world one of them was raised to defend and the world the other needed. These sequences are the best thing in the film: unresolved, alive, uncomfortable in exactly the right way. Gogaladze then widens the lens, cutting to observational sequences shot in children's classes across Georgia — history, ballet, dance, art. The institutional atmosphere barely shifts between them. Even in art class, teachers leave minimal room for individual expression. Obedience is not a by-product of these environments; it is the curriculum. The film is making an argument: what happened in Gogaladze's childhood was not an aberration but a pattern, reproduced at scale. The structural seam between the personal and the observational is the film's main friction point. The transitions feel abrupt, and the contextual scaffolding needed to make Georgia's specific historical relationship to collectivism fully legible — a nation invaded repeatedly, compelled to defend a homogenous national identity — is present but thin. You feel the argument before you fully understand it. A little more historical grounding would not have weakened the intimacy; it would have earned the generalization. What saves the film from the trap of being a personal grievance dressed as social critique is Gogaladze's willingness to hold her mother with genuine curiosity rather than prosecutorial intent. The generational chasm the film maps — between a parent shaped by one set of survival tools and a child who needed different ones — is treated as tragedy, not verdict. That restraint is real directorial maturity for a debut, and it's what makes the film worth the discomfort it asks you to sit with.
