BATTLE ROYALE screening at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

Kinji Fukasaku | 2000 | Japan | 1h53m | Presented in the original Japanese audio with English subtitles

BATTLE ROYALE is one of the key films of turn-of-the-century Japanese cinema, and one of the most brutally effective dystopian films ever made. Adapted from Koushun Takami’s novel by Kenta Fukasaku, BATTLE ROYALE IS Set in a near-future Japan where a class of schoolchildren is forced by the government into a deadly survival exercise. Kinji Fukasaku directs it with real anger. He had already transformed the yakuza film with BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR AND HUMANITY, and you can feel that same bitterness here, the sense of a social order that has rotted from the top down.

The film is violent, sometimes gratuitously so. The students arrive with crushes, grudges, loyalties and private fears, and all of that gets dragged into a system designed to strip them of trust and turn them against each other. Fukasaku understood violence as social collapse, not entertainment. He was part of a generation marked by war, and BATTLE ROYALE carries that distrust of authority. Its influence has been long and obvious.

On release, the film caused major controversy in Japan. Politicians condemned it, with the debate primarily concerned with the impact of violence on young minds. Its reputation spread far beyond its home country. Since then it's become a cult landmark and a major reference point for later dystopian stories about ritualised competition and state cruelty. But BATTLE ROYALE still feels harsher and more alive than most of what followed. It doesn’t offer clean heroes, easy morals or any comforting distance from the world it depicts.

If SQUID GAME made you curious about the survival-game genre, this is one of the essential films to go back to. The creator has openly acknowledged BATTLE ROYALE as one of the major works that inspired him.

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 the first floor. You can also check our Instagram story highlights for a video showing exactly how to find us:
https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17933106294029235/