‘9-Month Contract’ review: Powerful documentary explores Georgia’s exploitative surrogacy industry

Dir: Ketevan Vashagashvili. Georgia/Bulgaria/Germany. 2025. 77mins.

The selfless love between a single mother and her teenage daughter is shown to be a fortress against an often exploitative and indifferent world in Ketevan Vashagashvili’s tough but moving documentary. Through the stories of 29-year-old Zhana Vakhtangishvili and her daughter Elene Kukhtinovi, who turns 14 during the film, 9-Month Contract explores Georgia’s surrogacy industry, which takes advantage of the country’s impoverished and desperate.

The trust the documentarian has built down the years pays off 

Most audiences will be fortunate enough never to experience a fraction of the struggle faced by Zhana, who grew up in an orphanage, but they are likely to connect on an emotional level with her resilience against the odds. The film has already found firm footing on the festival circuit since its world premiere at CPH:DOX, where it won the Human:Rights Award, showing at DOK.fest Munich and is now in Sarajevo’s documentary competition. Niche distribution or a streaming berth is possible further along the line.

The filmmaker has known Zhana and Elene for more than a decade, after previously shooting reportage about their lives when the pair lived on the streets of Tbilisi – footage she includes here. The trust built up over the years by the documentarian pays off in terms of the intimacy she shares with the pair. Mostly the subjects talk as though the camera isn’t there, although there are moments when Vashagashvili becomes a confidante of sorts.

Rather than offer a lot of scene setting, Vashagashvili quickly introduces the main way Zhana has found to make ends meet: renting out her womb for $14,000. Now on her third surrogacy and her fourth c-section, the affect on her physical health is running deep, and that is before the mental strain added by trying to keep her latest pregnancy a secret from her whipsmart daughter and other people she knows due to stigma. “I’m only doing this for you,” is Zhana’s mantra – but she is not only living for her daughter but attempting, on some level, to live through her. And while Elene is meeting her mother’s high academic expectations, the situation is increasingly at odds with the teenager’s aspirations.

When the birth needs to be induced early for health reasons, Zhana’s surrogacy becomes problematic and she is threatened by the surrogate father after refusing to flout the law to get the baby out of hospital. Zhana enlists the help of a human-rights organisation to try to stop the surrogacy agency exploiting others and, while more detail regarding the ins and outs of the social backdrop would be welcome, we really feel the trauma of her predicament.

The same is true of Zhana’s attempts to gain social housing against a challenging political background – something that has only become more turbulent since the film was made. Despite her health problems, pregnancy once again seems to present the only answer for Zhana, and the film becoming ever more compelling as the situation unfolds.

While much of Zhana and Elene’s life is hard, Vashagashvili also has an eye for lyrical moments, whether it is capturing the mum and daughter washing one another’s hair, playing in the snow or curling up together for the night. The documentarian is also watchful in terms of Elene, capturing reactions that her stressed mother does not always notice – and it is the youngster’s potential as a catalyst for change for Zhana that comes to the fore.