IN BLOOM, an award-winning film co-directed by Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross, and Georgia’s Official Entry for the Best Foreign Language Film, will open in New York at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center onJanuary 10, 2014. A national release will follow.

 IN BLOOM, the directorial debut of Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross, is inspired by Nana’s personal memories of her youth in the troubled early 1990s in Georgia. The film follows inseparable friends Eka and Natia, both fourteen years old and at the end of their childhood in the early nineties Tbilisi, the capital of the newly independent Georgia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The country is facing violence, war on the Black Sea coast (Abkhazia) and vigilante justice that plague society. But for Eka and Natia, life just unfolds: in the street, at school, with friends or elder sisters who are already dealing with male dominance, early marriage and disillusioned love. For these two girls in bloom, life just goes on…

IN BLOOM premiered at the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the C.I.C.A.E. prize. The film went on to screen at a number of international film festivals picking up multiple prizes along the way, including the Special Jury Prize at the Montreal Film Festival and the FIPRESCI prize and Golden Firebird in Hong Kong. In US, the film screened at the Hamptons International Film Festival and at AFI Fest in Los Angeles, where it won the New Auteurs Award for Personal Storytelling. IN BLOOM has been selected to screen at the upcoming Palm Springs International Film Festival in January 2014.