GANDAHAR animation at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

René Laloux | 1987 | France | 1h18m | Presented in the original French audio with English subtitles

With GANDAHAR, René Laloux made animated science fiction that feels dreamlike on the surface and deeply pessimistic underneath. Set on a distant utopian planet threatened by a force of metallic destruction, it begins like fantasy and gradually reveals itself as something colder and more unsettling, a film about time, mutation, memory and the fragility of any civilisation that believes itself beyond history. René Laloux had already made FANTASTIC PLANET and TIME MASTERS, so by the time he came to GANDAHAR he was already one of the key figures in adult European animation. What makes this film distinctive even within his body of work is its elegance, the calm surface, the ornate design, and the creeping sense that catastrophe is already built into the world from the start.

The film matters in part because of the collaboration behind it. Laloux adapted Jean-Pierre Andrevon’s novel and worked with the great illustrator Philippe Caza, whose designs give GANDAHAR its distinctive visual identity, soft, organic, sensuous, and then suddenly interrupted by machinery, violence and deformation. That contrast is central to the film’s power. The world of Gandahar is full of beauty, but it is not innocent. Laloux was always drawn to speculative fiction that carried an argument inside it, and here the argument concerns the arrogance of perfect societies, the violence hidden inside technological futures, and the way political complacency leaves entire cultures exposed. Few animated films from the 1980s are this interested in ideas.

GANDAHAR also belongs to a period when European animation was still willing to be literary, conceptual and openly adult without chasing the rhythms of American commercial animation. It did not become a mass-market classic, but it has endured as a cult object for viewers interested in the stranger edges of science fiction cinema. Its reputation now sits alongside Laloux’s other major films, and rightly so. GANDAHAR is full of inventions, visual, narrative and philosophical, and it carries that rare feeling of a film made from an intact imaginative world rather than a marketable premise. On a big screen, its textures, colours and oddities have room to breathe.

NOTE: GANDAHAR is also available to see as part 2 of Tuesday's Animation Film Double alongside WICKED CITY. Please click here to find out more.

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/