Coming from a background of producing documentaries and programmes for Georgian television, Ketevan Vashagashvili makes her full-length debut with 9-Month Contract, exploring – over several years – one Georgian woman’s experience of making money through the commercial surrogacy business in order to support herself and her daughter financially. Continuing its run in Sarajevo’s Documentary Competition, the film enjoyed its world premiere at CPH:DOX in March this year, in the Human Rights strand. Uniquely, Vashagashvili began filming the two of them 12 years ago, when the daughter was four and they were both unhoused in Tbilisi, as she explains in a voice-over.

Having grown up an orphan herself, 30-year-old single mother Zhana wishes for her 15-year-old daughter, Elene, to finish her formal education, attend university and become a judge. Vashagashvili explores Zhana’s longitudinal quest to get by: through surrogacy that pays $14,000 per pregnancy, all while working service jobs. However, she works to hide her ongoing scheme from her teenage daughter, not wanting to burden her with further worries while she excels at school. But on her fourth c-section, she finds herself in a crisis, with the surrogacy agency behaving erratically and illegally – leaving her in a bind.

The filmmaker clearly has her sights set on illuminating the lengths that people go to when engaging in voluntary biopolitical self-exploitation to survive today, which she accomplishes even in the first few minutes of the film – her hushed phone conversations and obvious constant discomfort say it all. However, Vashagashvili’s approach creates semi-curated conversations for Zhana to explain the difficulties of her interconnected plight, rather than also let the intensive medical and bureaucratic encounters speak for themselves in greater detail. We are often only privy to certain skims through various types of encounters, never following any particular processes in their entirety.

Likewise, she only digs more deeply into the gentle and intimate relationship between Zhana and Elene in the film’s later scenes. In this manner, 9-Month Contract often leaves the material to float on the surface of its broad themes, leaving the viewer desirous of more showing and less telling. For instance, initially intense spots of conflict, such as a father threatening her while she attempts a civil court case against a set of illegal actions, are resolved off-camera and without fanfare.

At its core, the film appeals to a universal sentiment: Zhana simply dreams of Elene’s wellbeing, at which her daughter is surprised. Shouldn’t that be a given and a human right, rather than a dream, Elene wonders. Apparently not. But even through her fifth c-section, Zhana smiles and simply shakes her head at the camera, seemingly amused. Vashagashvili gets at something fundamental: that a parent’s love for their child and a woman’s strength and determination are unimaginably strong – even in the most difficult of circumstances.

9-Month Contract is a Georgian-Bulgarian-German co-production by Tbilisi-based 1991 Productions, Sofia-based Agitprop and Berlin-based Vincent Productions. Its world sales are managed by CAT&Docs.