Georgia’s Oscar bid wins top prize at Eurasia Film Fest

The film selected as Georgia's 2017 Oscar bid has collected another international prize after screening at a cinema festival in Kazakhstan's largest city last week.

Filmmaker Rusudan Glurjidze's feature House of Others won two principal prizes at the Eurasia International Film Festival, which ran from September 24-30 in Almaty.

House of Others won the Grand Prix award and a special NETPAC prize, an honour granted by international cinema experts and professionals of the Network for the Promotion of Asia Pacific Cinema.

See the trailer for 'House of Others' below:

The film screened in the Feature Films Competition section along with 12 other films from countries including Turkey, France, Switzerland, Israel and Russia.

Another in-competition section was Short Films Competition with 15 short films, with more submissions screened within out-of-competition sections Special Screenings, Panorama, Eurasia Docs, Eurasia Kids and Eurasia Retro.

A scene from 'House of Others'. Photo from House of Others film page/Facebook.

For Glurjidze, the two prizes come fresh on the heels of major recognition of the film at the prestigious Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic in July.

The Georgian director's 2016 work also claimed the Cinema Extraordinaire prize at the Bergen International Film Festival in Norway last month.

House of Others is Georgia's attempt at winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2017 Oscars.

A scene from 'House of Others'. Photo from House of Others film page/Facebook.

A co-production between Georgia, Russia, Spain and Croatia, House of Others is a drama that follows two families that survive the destructive Abkhazia war in Georgia in the early 1990s. It shows civilians on the winning side struggle to begin a new life in houses cleared of their expelled owners.

The full list of films presented at this year’s Eurasia International Film Festival can be found here.