CRASH Cronenberg screening at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

David Cronenberg | 1996 | Canada/UK | 1h40m | Presented in the original English audio with English subtitles

David Cronenberg’s CRASH is one of the most confrontational films of the 1990s, and one of the clearest expressions of the strange territory his cinema keeps returning to: the point where technology, desire, injury and alienation begin to collapse into each other. Adapted from J. G. Ballard’s controversial novel, the film follows a group of people whose erotic lives centre around car crashes and damaged bodies. That premise alone made the film notorious, but this is not exploitation dressed up as art cinema. It's a rigorous, deeply unsettling film about people so numbed by contemporary life that they can only feel alive through impact, trauma and by taking extreme physical risks.

CRASH premiered at Cannes in 1996, where it won the Special Jury Prize, and it remains one of Cronenberg’s most divisive and discussed works. Its original release triggered major controversy in the UK, but the BBFC still passed it uncut, which only reinforced its status as one of the defining flashpoints of 1990s film culture.

WHY I'VE INCLUDED IT IN THIS WEEK’S PROGRAM: This week is full of films about damaged systems, damaged people and the warped conditions of modern life, and CRASH may be the most disturbing version of that idea in the whole schedule. It takes the emotional deadness of late twentieth century consumer society and turns it into something physical. The cars are not just props here. They are part of the film’s whole argument about modernity, control, spectacle and desire. CRASH belongs in this program because it refuses easy moral framing and because it pushes its ideas to a place very few filmmakers would dare go. It's cool, clinical, perverse and completely Cronenberg.

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/