Georgian Director Ana Urushadze Prepares 'Fear of Butterflies,' a Detective Story Rooted in Her Own Phobia
Georgian director Ana Urushadze is preparing her third feature film, titled Fear of Butterflies, a project she describes as a detective story with mysticism and body horror woven through it (Variety).
The film follows a young woman on the cusp of 30 who is going through bizarre things mentally and physically. Urushadze frames it as an exploration of the mordant consequences of a woman not accepting her body — a detective story with a little bit of mysticism and a touch of body horror (Variety).
The title is not metaphorical window dressing. Urushadze has harboured a severe fear of butterflies since early childhood. A psychologist friend once told her that if a butterfly were human, it would be a very sick person or an invalid. Urushadze connected that image to her own fear of being like that; she is an avowed hypochondriac, and the film draws directly on that anxiety (Variety).
Behind the camera, Fear of Butterflies reunites Urushadze with Estonian producer Ivo Felt's Tallinn-based company Allfilm, which co-produced her previous feature, Supporting Role (Variety). Where the film will actually shoot is less certain. A long-running boycott of the state-backed Georgian National Film Center by many industry professionals has pushed Urushadze to look abroad for financing, and she is not sure whether Fear of Butterflies will be made in Georgia at all (Variety).
The news arrives as Urushadze's second feature, Supporting Role, screens in competition at the Sarajevo Film Festival. The film world-premiered earlier in 2026 in the Tiger Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it won a Special Jury award and the FIPRESCI prize — the latter awarded by the international critics' association — in January (Variety; Sarajevo Film Festival). It is a 2026 co-production of Georgia, Estonia and Türkiye, running 139 minutes (Sarajevo Film Festival).
Supporting Role stars Dato Bakhtadze as Niaz, a once-famous star of Georgian cinema who embarks on a bizarre and fatalistic odyssey of self-transformation after an unsettling audition with a young female director. The story was sparked by a real encounter: during auditions for Urushadze's debut feature, Scary Mother, an elderly actor turned down a role, put off by a young, inexperienced woman in the director's chair (Variety).
Scary Mother launched Urushadze's career in 2017, winning the best first feature prize at Locarno and top honours at Sarajevo (Variety). Her three-film trajectory now runs from a mother's secret literary rebellion, through an ageing actor's unraveling, toward a detective story about a body turning strange — each anchored in a personal fear, transmuted into cinema.
