Providing certain vivid detail but rather lacking in vitality, Ekvtimishvili’s screenplay is stronger on sociology than drama.
My Happy Family(ჩემი ბედნიერი ოჯახი)
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Georgia, Germany, France · 2017
1h 59m
Director Simon Groß
Starring Ia Shugliashvili, Merab Ninidze, Berta Khapava, Tsisia Qumsashvili
Genre Drama
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In a patriarchal society, an ordinary Georgian family lives with three generations under one roof. All are shocked when 52-year-old Manana decides to move out from her parents’ home. Without her family and her husband, Manana embarks on a kind of journey that she has never experienced before: a journey on her own.
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What are critics saying?
We’re left with a prickly kind of harmony that blends mundanity with profundity. There’s no more perfect a note for a film as intelligent, compassionate, and complex as “My Happy Family” to end on than that.
There isn’t a single second that doesn’t ring as achingly true.
With a remarkable fullness of understanding, it tells a deeply personal story while revealing essential human truths, all without ever feeling constructed or false.
It casually lays out the domestic space where the story’s events takes place with acutely detailed cultural specificity.
It’s at once a celebration of individuality and its potential to unnerve those who resist it.
The Hollywood Reporter by Jordan Mintzer
It’s a simple, somewhat mundane scenario that, in the hands of a terrific cast and two talented filmmakers, is transformed into a minor Greek comic-tragedy, with one fearless woman trying to stave off loved ones who smother her with guilt and affection.
Screen International by Lee Marshall
Slow-paced but always absorbing, the film features a magnetic central performance by Ia Shugliashvili as one of the strongest, most quietly heroic introverts we’ve seen on screen in a while.
RogerEbert.com by Matt Fagerholm
Many of the year’s best films feature female protagonists who are resolved to live on their own terms, and My Happy Family ranks right alongside them.
A low-key yet complex family drama, My Happy Family is a quietly devastating portrait of what it means to be a woman in a man's world.
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