BORDERLAND VISIONS All-Day Film Pass: Ukrainian Film Week at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

Saturday 16 May

ATLANTIS: 17:00
Intermission: 18:45
BAD ROADS: 19:00
Intermission: 20:45
PAMFIR: 21:00

IMPORTANT: Tickets purchased on this page are for the ALL-DAY film pass. If you only wish to see one of Saturday's films please visit the relevant ticketing page here.

#1 ATLANTIS
Valentyn Vasyanovych | 2019 | Ukraine | 1h46m | Presented in the original Ukrainian audio with English subtitles

ATLANTIS imagines eastern Ukraine after the war has ended, but refuses the fantasy that peace means repair. Valentyn Vasyanovych sets the film in 2025, in a Donbas landscape scarred by conflict, industry and environmental collapse. The shooting has stopped, but the damage remains in the soil, the water, the factories and the people left behind.

The film follows Sergiy, a former soldier trying to live inside a country that no longer seems built for ordinary life. He works, drifts, and eventually joins an exhumation mission recovering the bodies of those killed during the war. Vasyanovych films this world with long, still compositions that give every landscape and interior a brutal clarity.

ATLANTIS won Best Film in the Orizzonti section at Venice and became one of the defining Ukrainian films of the years before Russia’s full-scale invasion. Seen now, its near-future premise feels less speculative and more like a warning delivered early. It understands war as something that outlives the battlefield.

Opening Saturday’s Borderland Visions of Ruin program, ATLANTIS gives the day its first image of a damaged landscape. It screens before BAD ROADS and PAMFIR, forming a contemporary Ukrainian sequence about war, territory, survival and the bodies left to carry history.

#2 BAD ROADS
Nataliia Vorozhbyt | 2020 | Ukraine | 1h45m | Presented in the original Ukrainian and Russian audio with English subtitles

BAD ROADS follows four stories set around the roads of Donbas, where war has broken the normal rules of movement, trust and human behaviour. Adapted by Nataliia Vorozhbyt from her own stage work, the film looks at checkpoints, occupied spaces, damaged relationships and the strange moral weather created by life near the front.

The film doesn’t present war through large battles or spectacle. It focuses on encounters: a school principal stopped at a military checkpoint, teenage girls drawn toward soldiers, a journalist trapped in a horrifying situation, and a woman trying to make sense of casual violence after her car hits a chicken. Each episode shows how quickly ordinary life can become unstable when power resides in the wrong hands.

Vorozhbyt is one of Ukraine’s most important contemporary playwrights and screenwriters, and her ear for speech gives the film its force. Conversations begin with jokes, flirtation, suspicion or awkward politeness, then shift into something more dangerous.

Screening after ATLANTIS and before PAMFIR, BAD ROADS sits at the centre of Saturday’s Borderland Visions of Ruin program. It brings the landscape of war down to human scale: roads, checkpoints, rooms, cars, bodies, silences and decisions no one can fully escape.

#3 PAMFIR
Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk | 2022 | Ukraine | 1h46m | Presented in the original Ukrainian audio with English subtitles

PAMFIR is a muscular Ukrainian borderland drama about family, smuggling, masculinity and the rituals people invent to survive hard places. Set in western Ukraine near the Romanian border, the film follows Leonid, known as Pamfir, who returns home after working abroad and tries to rebuild his place inside his family and community.

His return doesn’t stay peaceful for long. When his son’s reckless mistake leaves the family exposed, Pamfir is pulled back toward the illegal work he had tried to leave behind. The film builds its tension through loyalty, shame, debt and the pressure to provide, all set against a region where the law and local codes don’t always point in the same direction.

Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk gives the film a strong physical force. Bodies move through forests, roads, homes, churches and carnival crowds under constant pressure. The Malanka celebrations are central to the film’s power. Malanka is a Ukrainian New Year folk tradition, especially in western Ukraine. In PAMFIR, it becomes more than a backdrop. It’s also one of the most visually alive parts of the film. Smoke, fire, bodies, drums, handmade costumes, faces hidden behind masks. On the big screen, it’s genuinely stunning.

Closing Saturday’s Borderland Visions of Ruin program, PAMFIR follows ATLANTIS and BAD ROADS with a different kind of Ukrainian survival story. War sits further from the frame, but pressure is everywhere: in family duty, border economies, inherited reputation and the cost of being seen as strong.

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/stories/highlights/17933106294029235/