Nana Ekvtimishvili & Simon Groß: In Bloom (Grzeli nateli dgeebi)

In Bloom (Grzeli nateli dgeebi), Nana Ekvtimishvili & Simon Groß, 95’, Georgia / France / Germany, ZDF 18.2.2016, OV with German subtitles

Nana Ekvtimishvili grew up in the post-soviet Georgia of the 1990s. That’s how the idea for her first feature-length film emerged. The friends Eka and Natia, both 14, live in Tbilisi. They queue together for bread, share their family worries and their love woes. Chaos and uncertainty reigns around them. One day Natia has a gun. Yet she does not fight back when she is abducted and forced into marriage. Only when violence among the men escalates does the weapon reappear. A film that remains unforgettable primarily because of its strong characters: “For us, the passion and wealth of ideas of our main characters as well as their actresses are the pillars that support this film,” write the director duo. “Perhaps we can all recognise something of ourselves in these two girls.”

Nana Ekvtimishvili (*1978) is a Georgian writer and film director. Simon Gross (*1976) is a German film director and cinematographer. The director duo has been making films together since 2013. In cooperation with Das kleine Fernsehspiel, they made their feature film debut in Georgia In Bloom (2016) and My Happy Family (2019). Both films premiered at the Berlinale Forum. Ekvtimishvili’s first novel The Pear Field was published in 2018.