A rare lymphoma diagnosis meant Giorgi Gagoshidze had to abandon a film project on the economic factors behind the USSR’s collapse – until he found new meaning in medical terminology

In autumn 2022, Giorgi Gagoshidze was in the middle of making a documentary film about the unravelling of the Soviet Union when he experienced his own personal system collapse. After returning from filming in Tbilisi to Berlin, where the 42-year-old Georgian artist lives, he was suffering from shortness of breath. An X-ray revealed that both his lungs had filled with water. He was told to get a taxi to the German capital’s Charité hospital straight away if he wanted to live.

Gagoshidze was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoma, a rare, aggressive and fast-growing form of blood cancer in an advanced but curable stage. A brutal cocktail of chemotherapy followed by an eight-month hospital stay in isolation was his only shot at survival.