In 2012, a documentary was broadcast on TV Channel 9. It was a story about a young woman who grew up in an orphanage and lived in the street with her 4-year-old son. She worked every day, begging for alms to rent a place in an Internet cafe for 5 GEL, where she would spend the night with her child. The audience took her story to heart and was moved by it. People were calling on television to find this woman and help her. Soon the authors uploaded the film to the Internet, set up a bank account there and it became possible for the main character, Zhanna to rent a house and leave the street. The director of this film was Ketevan (Keti) Vashagashvili. Her other works (documentaries, tele-blogs) also mostly deal with social issues related to women.
“It was 2013. While sitting in an underground train, I saw an advertisement inviting women for surrogacy. I had a 3-year-old child and it was shocking to me. It aroused great interest – what is this process, how can you go through it and remain the same as you were before,” recalls Keti. She worked on the film “9-Month Contract” (2025) for 9 years, of which the last 5 years – intensively.
And here is this documentary on the screen. You watch it and don’t feel that it is a movie. For an hour and 20 minutes, you also live with the main character of the film and her daughter, Elene. The main character is again Zhanna – a four-time surrogate mother. In 2016, she herself offered the director herself to make a film about surrogacy. By this time, Keti had already selected several other women and filming had begun but there was a lot of pressure from their families and relatives (usually women hide this. They sometimes go to another city for 9 months and say that they have gone abroad). Zhanna had no family or relatives but it was still difficult for her to take this step because of the judgment of society and her child.
The film is made with a cautious and delicate attitude. You silently follow the story of a selfless mother together with the author and think, is this happening right here, next to us? And this is not a single case. After all, we notice people who are more successful, smarter, more beautiful, and have everything than we do. At the same time, we can also see the unsuccessful, the unremarkable and we don’t want to focus on them for long. The real Zhanna’s character reminds us of such timeless movie characters as: Charlie, Cabiria, Gelsomina...
Zhanna is also like that – inconspicuous but full of hope and unwavering. She already had a positive experience when she talked about her problem in the film. This changed the situation to some extent. However, now we can see that she did not talk to her own child about surrogacy for a long time because she had been protecting her emotionally and was afraid that Elene would judge her (presumably, Zhanna also had a problem with herself – she believed that she was somehow ruining something and doing something that she should not have done). Her child has grown up in the meantime. She is already 14 years old. Elene’s character is the one without whom the film would not be as multifaceted and deep as it is.
The climax is where the dialogue between mother and daughter takes place and Elene tells her that she understood everything. This girl’s tears are the purest thing the viewer can see. “Don’t show me this money. I don’t need it,” Elene cries. The mother and child can no longer notice the camera hidden in the corner of the room (the cameraman is sometimes the director himself, sometimes Giviko Tukhareli).
The film shows how unregulated the issue of surrogacy is, how vulnerable both the woman and the child born by a surrogate mother are, how women's medical, social and other rights are violated but even this is not the main thing in "9-Month Contract." The film is about motherhood, about what a mother can do for her child. This is a voluntary sacrifice - when a person harms herself, does not take care of her body, her health. Permanent pregnancy, in parallel, working in a supermarket, on the night shift (because the night shift pays more) and constantly staying up all night bring Zhanna's health to a critical limit but she does not worry about this, her only concern is Elene. She wants Elene to become a prosecutor so that she can protect herself and others. Elene also looks at her mother with love and is ready to fulfill her wish. Then the time comes when she says: “That’s why our country is in such trouble, because mothers oblige our children to do what they themselves could not do.” Elene grows up before our eyes. Once she herself asks her mother what her dream is. It turns out that Zhanna only wants Elene to be well, to study, to achieve success, and not to have the problems that she had. Zhanna does not have her own personal dream, she has not even thought about it. She is completely devoted to motherhood (this might be the reason why she did not look after any of her children, so that later it would not be difficult for her to let them go).
There comes a moment when Zhanna and Elene switch roles. The director has depicted this moment with amazing skill and indifference to reality. If at the beginning of the film Zhanna is beating her little girl, now Elene is pouring water on her mother's head (Rezo Gabriadze's words from "Hari-Harale, Mum" come to mind - no one could so gently pour water on grandma’s head as grandpa did). Elene also starts to take care of her mother so that she can get a secondary education certificate and takes the 30-year-old woman to school. The audience already knows that sooner or later everything will work out for these people. The final scenes are excellent, when Elene cuts her beautiful long hair and goes outside, on the main avenue of the capital.
This film is a Georgian-German-Bulgarian co-production. At first, the director made the film on his own, then Arte became interested, later German and then Bulgarian producers.
The world premiere took place in Denmark, in Copenhagen, where Zhanna and Elene were also present and the film received an award for the protection of human rights. The film was awarded many times at film festivals in Turkey, Slovakia, Spain, France, Hungary, and USA. Here, “9-Month Contract” received a Special Jury Mention in the International Film Competition section of the New York Documentary Film Festival, which reads: “The jury particularly notes the sensitivity and mastery of “9- Month Contract.” „It is a virtuoso example of “cinema verité” which is based on the trust between the director and the protagonist. Through precise editing and silent observation, the film takes us into a mother and daughter’s intimate world. This is a story connected by love and the desire to survive, which radiates tenderness and dignity” even against the backdrop of a harsh reality. Most recently, the film received the “Golden Prometheus” at the 26th Tbilisi International Film Festival.
The director saw the announcement in the subway car and thought about this topic, where was it that Zhanna heard about surrogacy?“My girls from the orphanage have been doing this for a long time,” Zhanna told Keti. Basically, those girls become surrogate mothers who grew up in orphanages, those who don’t have a family, don’t have the education to have a decent job and salary, don’t have a roof over their heads to keep them from living on the streets.
Ketevan Pataraia
