A MOMENT OF INNOCENCE: Cinephile Week at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

To coincide with our hosting of the shnit worldwide shortfilmfestival (Aug 22-27), for the next two weeks FOMO is celebrating filmmaking itself. We’re screening a special program for cinephiles built around movies about movies. We’ll look at filmmakers, actors, movie obsessives, collapsing productions, Hollywood mythology, French and Persian New Wave, and the strange process of turning an idea into something that ends up on a screen.

Some films are about making movies and the people who dedicate their lives to them. Others are about the places where we watch them and why cinema matters in the first place. It’s our own small celebration of the people, chaos and obsession behind the movies we love.

A MOMENT OF INNOCENCE

Mohsen Makhmalbaf | 1996 | Iran | 1h18m | Presented in the original Persian audio with English subtitles

A MOMENT OF INNOCENCE is one of the most unusual films ever made about a filmmaker returning to his own past and trying to understand it through cinema. It's playful, deeply personal and unexpectedly moving, with a final sequence that turns the entire exercise of reconstruction into something far more generous.

A bit of background for the uninitiated: When he was a teenager and political activist (many years before becoming one of Iran's most important filmmakers) Mohsen Makhmalbaf stabbed a policeman. Decades later, he encounters the same former policeman and decides to revisit the event on film.

Rather than stage a straightforward reconstruction, both men choose younger actors to play their former selves and begin rehearsing different versions of the same memory.

From there, the film becomes much harder to categorise. Documentary, autobiography, fiction and reenactment begin folding into one another. Each man remembers the past differently. The young actors bring their own personalities into the reconstruction. What initially seems like an attempt to reproduce a historical event slowly becomes a film about the impossibility of reproducing anything exactly as it happened.

Makhmalbaf approaches the material with remarkable lightness. There is humour, awkwardness and tenderness in the process, even though the original event was violent. The film gradually shifts away from the question of who remembers what correctly and toward something far more interesting: can cinema give people the chance to imagine a different version of themselves?

We’re showing A MOMENT OF INNOCENCE alongside Abbas Kiarostami’s CLOSE-UP, another landmark of Iranian cinema built around performance, identity and the unstable boundary between reality and filmmaking. The connection between them goes even further. CLOSE-UP centres on a man who impersonates Makhmalbaf, while A MOMENT OF INNOCENCE sees Makhmalbaf turning his own life into cinema.

Both films are part of our two-week program for cinephiles celebrating filmmaking itself, running alongside FOMO’s hosting of the shnit Worldwide Shortfilmfestival this August 22-27. Across the program, we’re looking at the people who make films, obsess over them and use cinema to reshape the stories they tell about themselves.

FOOD AND DRINK POLICY: FOMO Cinema Lounge Bar opens 1 hour before the first screening of the day and closes at 02:00, serving a wide selection of beer, wine, cocktails, and non-alcoholic refreshments including coffee and tea, as well as fresh hot popcorn! Outside food is allowed in the bar but not in the cinema. No alcohol from outside allowed. All guests are invited to arrive early and stay late!

LOCATION: FOMO Secret Cinema, Bazari Orbeliani, Tbilisi. A five minute walk from Liberty Square metro.

HOW TO FIND FOMO: Enter Bazari Orbeliani via Atoneli St above Carrefour and take the stairs on your left to Level 1. Signage on the door. You can also check our Instagram story highlights for a video showing exactly how to find us: https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3OTMzMTA2Mjk0MDI5MjM1