Sundance Film Festival premieres new film co-directed by Georgia’s Nana Ekvtimishvili

A new film by award-winning Georgian filmmaker Nana Ekvtimishvili and German director Simon Gross will have its world premiere at a leading international film festival next January.

My Happy Family is a German-Georgian-French co-production directed by Gross and Ekvtimishvili, whose previous collaboration In Bloom won numerous awards at international festivals and competitions.

Filming of My Happy Family launched in April this year, and the feature will make its cinema debut at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival in Utah, the United States.

Georgian director Nana Ekvtimishvili and Germany's Simon Gross received several awards for their cinema collaboration. Photo from AFP/Elvis Barukcic.

Recognised as the largest independent film festival in the US, the Sundance Film Festival will run from January 19-29, 2017. This year's annual event is expected to host tens of thousands of film-goers from across the world after last year's event attracted over 46,000 visitors.

The official program for the 2017 film festival will be released later this month however Ekvtimishvili and Gross confirmed to the media their new feature would screen within the festival's main competition program.

The film follows the story of a Georgian woman caught up in a conflict between her family and her personal freedom, and facing results of her decisions that cause divisions and confrontation between people in the plot.

While My Happy Family was still in production phase it won the Eurimages project development prize at the 2014 Sarajevo Film Festival in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Ekvtimishvili and Gross produced their first joint feature film In Bloom in 2013. It premiered at the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival.

Official support for filming My Happy Family was provided by the European Cinema Support Fund Eurimages, Germany's Federal Film Fund, Public Broadcaster ZDF and leading state film funding institution NRW, as well as cinema production agency BKM.

In addition to her career in film, Ekvtimishvili has been recognised for her literary work.

She received this year's Saba Literary Prize in Georgia for her debut novel The Pear Field and featured alongside other Georgian authors at the Stadt Land Buch 2016 literary festival in Germany's capital Berlin last month.