The Cannes film festival gets underway next month with a depressingly predictable lack of female directors – just three out of 21 films in the main competition are by women. Though nothing beats my favourite do-they-know-it’s-the-21st-century Cannes gaffe – when a group of women wearing flat shoes were banned from the red carpet for crimes against la féminité – it’s hardly a heartening figure.

Meanwhile, the Georgian Film Festival arrives in London this week with fewer yachts and less fake tan but a sizable chunk more of female directors – half of the films showing are directed by women. The festival has become a focus for the explosion of female film-making talent in Georgia, with a new generation of women making movies challenging gender roles in the country’s rigidly patriarchal society.

Writer-director Nana Ekvtimishvili wrote the story for the festival’s brilliant opening film My Happy Family, with a heavy dose of inspiration from her mother and sister. Her heroine is a 52-year-old teacher Manana (Ia Shugliashvili), who lives in a cramped flat in Tbilisi with her parents, husband and two adult kids – a common arrangement in Georgia, says Ekvtimishvili, who is 39 and directs as a duo with her husband, Simon Gross. Sick of being wife, mother and general dogsbody, Manana walks out on her family. ‘“Why? It’s so nice here,” asks her son, baffled. He gets cooked and cleaned for, so you can understand his confusion. On TV, an Orthodox priest in long black robes sermonises about female meekness: “Happy is the family with a peaceful mother who sacrifices herself to her family and raises children.”

Nana Ekvtimishvili in her interview says  that  there is a rising feminist movement to correspond to the recent crop of women directors. “No,” she answers bluntly. “It’s a pity, but that’s my impression. There are women’s rights organisations and individual activists. Great women, great voices. But there is no strong feminist movement. Still, in this society people think of feminism as against our Georgian tradition, as something dangerous.” Neatly bookending the festival, the closing film is the excellently titled Scary Mother by 27-year-old Ana Urushadze, another drama about a middle-aged woman casting off the shackles of domestic servitude – this time to write a novel.