GLORY TO THE QUEEN

Four Women From Georgia That Revolutionized Chess

Glory to the Queen reveals the intertwined lives of international chess heroes: Nona Gaprindashvili, Nana Alexandria, Maia Chiburdanidze and Nana Ioseliani. These four legendary female players from Georgia revolutionized women’s chess and became Soviet icons of women’s empowerment. The women leave a lasting legacy. They played together on the Soviet Union’s Olympic team, but they were also competitive with each other. Glory to the Queen brings them together again after a 25-year break, to remember their competitions and friendship. Now older, they are still important icons of the sport and the country.

THE FILMMAKER

Born in 1976 in Tbilisi, Georgia, Tatia (Tamar) Skhirtladze works and lives in Vienna, Austria. Graduated in Art Education in Tbilisi and Vienna and in Fine Arts in the Netherlands, Enschede, she currently teaches video art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her artistic work oscillates between visual arts and film, with a focus on site-specific as well as long-term mix media concepts. She works for different film production companies in Vienna as camerawoman and editor for documentary films, develops film education modules and conducts workshops on audio-visual artistic practices. Her first feature documentary Glory to the Queen received the Women in Film Best Pitch Award from the EWA Network and Film Center Serbia at the Fest Forward Film Festival in Belgrade, as well as the Serbia and Golden Prometheus Awards at the Tbilisi Film Festival.

FESTIVALS AND AWARDS

CinEast Film Festival, Luxembourg
This Human World Film Festival, Austria
The Hamburg International Queer Film Festival, Germany
goEast Film Festival, Germany
Bolzano Film Festival Bozen, Italy
Mill Valley Film Festival, U.S.
Kansas City FilmFest International, U.S.
It’s All True International Documentary Film Festival, Brazil
JEONJU International Film Festival, Republic of Korea
Vox Feminae International Film Festival, Croatia
Internationales Frauen* Film Fest Dortmund+Köln, Germany
The International Documentary Film Festival, France
Diagonale Festival of Austrian Film
Sotto le stelle dell’Austria Film Series, Austria
Espoo Ciné International Film Festival, Finland
Millennium Docs Against Gravity, Poland
The International Festival of Contemporary Arts – City of Women, Slovenia
Osnabrück Independent Film Festival, Germany
UnderhillFest, Montenegro
Braunschweig International Film Festival, Germany
The International Documentary Film Festival One World, Slovakia
Triest Film Festival, IT
East by Southeast, Denmark
FIPADOC International Documentary Film Festival, France
Women in Film Best Pitch Award from EWA Network and Film Center Serbia at the Fest Forward Film festival in Belgrade, Serbia
Audience Award - Free Zone Film Festival, Serbia
Honorable Mention - Doqumenta Non-Fiction Film Festival, Mexico
Honorable Mention - SEEfest Film Festival, U.S.
Golden Prometheus Award - CinéDOC Tbilisi Int’l Documentary Film Festival