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.
BABYLON
Damien Chazelle | 2022 | USA | 3h09m + 10 minute intermission | Presented in the original English audio with English subtitles
BABYLON is Damien Chazelle’s enormous, filthy, exhilarating vision of Hollywood at the moment silent cinema gives way to sound and an entire industry has to reinvent itself overnight.
Set across the late 1920s and early 1930s, the film follows a group of actors, musicians and filmmakers trying to survive that transition. Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy, a ferociously ambitious newcomer who believes stardom is simply a matter of being seen. Brad Pitt is Jack Conrad, an established silent-era leading man whose instincts no longer match the industry forming around him. Diego Calva plays Manny Torres, who enters Hollywood from the margins and gradually learns how the machinery works from the inside.
Chazelle treats early filmmaking as organised chaos. Multiple productions shoot side by side. Directors scream across vast outdoor sets. Crews improvise around accidents. Performers are expected to deliver under conditions that seem completely impossible. Then sound arrives and suddenly everyone has a new problem. Actors have to hit exact marks. Cameras have to be silenced. Microphones have to be hidden. A form that once thrived on movement becomes trapped by technology.
That transition gives BABYLON its real subject. The film is less interested in Hollywood glamour than in how quickly an industry can decide who still belongs. Careers rise and disappear with frightening speed. Styles change. Audiences move on. The people who helped build the system are often the first to be discarded by it.
BABYLON closes our two-week celebration of filmmaking itself, running alongside FOMO’s hosting of the shnit Worldwide Shortfilmfestival August 22-27. Across the program, we’ve looked at directors, actors, movie obsessives, improvised productions, collapsing productions and people who give their lives to cinema. BABYLON gathers almost all of that into one film and pushes it to its most excessive scale.
At 3h09m, BABYLON is a big finish in every sense, so we’ll include a 10-minute intermission.
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
FOMO Secret Cinema • Bazari Orbeliani, 0105 Tbilisi, Georgia
