BURDEN OF DREAMS: Documentary Week at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

FOMO Cinema Presents: The Art of the Documentary

A week of failed productions, obsessive directors and impossible shoots - this week at FOMO is dedicated to the underappreciated art of documentary filmmaking, and to the filmmakers stubborn enough to keep pointing the camera when common sense suggests they should pack it in.

BURDEN OF DREAMS

Les Blank | 1982 | USA/West Germany | 1h35m | Presented in the original English, German and Spanish audio with English subtitles

BURDEN OF DREAMS is one of the great documentaries about filmmaking as obsession, where the making of a film begins to look almost as strange, difficult, and unreasonable as the film itself.

Les Blank follows Werner Herzog during the production of FITZCARRALDO, Herzog’s madly ambitious drama about a man determined to drag a steamship over a mountain in the Amazon. Herzog, being Herzog, decided this should be done for real. No model, no studio trickery, no sensible alternative that might have preserved everyone’s nerves. The result is a documentary about creative conviction pushed to the point where it starts to resemble madness.

The production becomes a battlefield of delays, illness, weather, money problems, location troubles, physical danger, and Herzog’s own refusal to compromise. Blank doesn’t treat Herzog as a simple heroic genius or as a fool. He watches him closely, letting the contradictions accumulate. The film captures the strange magnetism of a director who can be visionary, impossible, lucid, arrogant, funny, exhausted, and completely committed to doing things the hard way.

Presented as part of FOMO’s Documentary Week, BURDEN OF DREAMS is essential cinema-on-cinema viewing. It shows filmmaking stripped of glamour and reduced to its most alarming ingredients: labour, ego, risk, faith, bad logistics, and the terrible beauty of a plan no sensible person would approve. For anyone interested in Herzog, impossible productions, or directors who treat reality as something to be argued with until it gives up, BURDEN OF DREAMS is magnificent, maddening, and very funny in the way only a production disaster can be.

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/