SCARY MOTHER

Winner of Best First Feature at Locarno, Scary Mother is an absurd, pitch-black take on sex, motherhood and female ambition from Georgian filmmaking phenom Ana Urushadze.

Manana is a woman in crisis. Rounding 50 and still cooped up in the drab, Communist-era apartment block in which she raised her family, she is aching to leave behind the confines of domesticity and indulge her literary aspirations. But her interests tend to the unabashedly erotic, and as she tries to navigate the impossibly constrictive net of middle-aged womanhood, the barriers between fact and fiction, reality and nightmare come tumbling down.

An offbeat feminist parable turned full-blown surrealist meltdown, Scary Mother is the visually ambitious and deftly assured feature debut from writer/director Ana Urushadze. With this inimitably Georgian tale with global resonance, the 27-year-old Urushadze has delivered a searing work of cinema that marks her as a talent to watch for decades to come.

"A startling debut that wholly earns its place as standard-bearer for one of the most exciting and distinctive national cinemas to have emerged in recent years.""– Variety