GLORY TO THE QUEEN (Minority coproduction)

Glory to the Queen explores an extraordinary biographical pattern between four women who became icons of women‘s emancipation during the Soviet era. The focus lies on the legendary Soviet Georgian chess players Nona Gaprindashvili, Maia Chiburdanidze, Nana Alexandria and Nana Ioseliani. The film leads us to Tbilisi in Georgia, where all four women live today. From the beginning of the 1960s until the collapse of the Soviet Union, these four players revolutionized “women’s chess”, and for the first time raised it to “men‘s level“ in an international context.. The four, who often played together as the Soviet Union‘s Olympic team, were also tough opponents on the chessboard throughout their lives and have not been jointly sitting at a table, let alone at a chess- board, for over 20 years. Glory to the Queen brings all four together again: a final performance and an encounter with the next generation. Glory to the Queen is a film about winning and losing on the chessboard and in life, and about rebelling against a powerful male system. A cinematic reflection on how the struggle for independence and freedom experienced by individual women echoes in individual and collective life stories.