Machine & Earth Film Double: Ukrainian Film Week at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

Tuesday 12 May

ENTHUSIASM: SYMPHONY OF THE DONBAS: 19:30
Intermission: 20:40
EARTH: 21:00
END: 22:15

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

#1 ENTHUSIASM: SYMPHONY OF THE DONBAS
Dziga Vertov | 1930 | Ukrainian SSR | 1h05m | Presented in the original Russian and Ukrainian audio with English subtitles

ENTHUSIASM: SYMPHONY OF THE DONBAS captures the Donbas at the height of Soviet industrialisation, when coal, steel, labour and propaganda were being turned into a new image of the future. Dziga Vertov made the film during the first Five-Year Plan, using mines, factories, workers, radio broadcasts and public ceremonies as the raw material for one of Soviet cinema’s first major sound experiments.

Vertov had already transformed film language with MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA. Here, he pushed further by making sound central to the film’s structure. Machinery, voices, music, slogans and industrial noise are carefully arranged to shape the pacing, rhythm and editing. Sound does not simply accompany the image. It drives the film forward.

The politics are impossible to ignore. The film celebrates Soviet labour and the forced march toward industrial modernity, while also showing the violence of that transformation. Religious ritual and older forms of village life are presented as obstacles to be swept away by coal, steel and collective production.

Screening before EARTH, ENTHUSIASM gives our Ukrainian Film Week its first major contrast: Donbas as Soviet industrial future, followed by Dovzhenko’s vision of land, harvest, rural death and uneasy transformation. Machine first. Earth after.

EARTH
Oleksandr Dovzhenko | 1930 | Ukrainian SSR | 1h15m | Silent film with English subtitles

EARTH is one of the foundational works of Ukrainian cinema, a silent film that turns village life, harvest, death and political upheaval into something vast and elemental. Oleksandr Dovzhenko made it at the end of the silent era, drawing on the soil, faces, rituals and rural rhythms of Ukraine with an intensity that still feels startling.

Dovzhenko was born in what is now Chernihiv Oblast and became one of the major figures of early Soviet cinema, alongside Eisenstein (who we screened last week), Pudovkin and Vertov. Yet his work never fully belonged to Moscow’s official language. EARTH was criticised by Soviet authorities soon after release, partly because its politics were too ambiguous and its attachment to Ukrainian rural life was too strong to operate like simple propaganda.

The film follows a Ukrainian village during collectivisation, as the arrival of a tractor promises a new future and also tears open a conflict between generations, property, belief and power. The fields, fruit, animals, houses and bodies all carry meaning. His images make Ukrainian land feel alive with memory and danger.

Nearly a century later, EARTH remains one of cinema’s great poems of land and mortality. It belongs to world film history, but its roots are unmistakably Ukrainian: black soil, village ritual, harvest, grief, desire, and the uneasy arrival of a future no one fully controls.

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/