Family Baggage Film Double - Ukrainian Film Week at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

Wednesday 13 May

LUXEMBOURG, LUXEMBOURG: 19:00
Intermission: 20:45
EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED: 21:00
END: 22:45

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

LUXEMBOURG, LUXEMBOURG
Antonio Lukich | 2022 | Ukraine | 1h45m | Presented in the original Ukrainian and German audio with English subtitles

LUXEMBOURG, LUXEMBOURG is a Ukrainian comedy about two brothers, one absent father, and the way family myths can keep shaping people long after the person behind them has disappeared. Antonio Lukich follows twin brothers Kolya and Vasya, whose lives in central Ukraine have taken very different shapes. One is chaotic, impulsive and permanently close to trouble. The other has built himself around order, work and respectability.

When they learn their estranged father may be dying in Luxembourg, the brothers are pulled into a journey neither of them can approach honestly. For one, the father remains a heroic figure. For the other, he is a wound best left untouched. Lukich uses this tension to build a film that is funny without being weightless, and sentimental only when it earns the right.

The film premiered in the Orizzonti section at Venice, where it helped introduce a wider international audience to Lukich’s dry, precise comic voice. His humour comes from embarrassment, family friction and the small humiliations of ordinary life rather than easy punchlines.

Screening after EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED, LUXEMBOURG, LUXEMBOURG keeps Wednesday’s theme of family baggage firmly on the road. Both films are about men searching for missing pieces of family history. Neither finds exactly what they were looking for.

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED
Liev Schreiber | 2005 | USA | 1h46m | Presented in the original English, Russian and Ukrainian audio with English subtitles

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED follows a young American collector of family objects as he travels to Ukraine in search of the woman who may have saved his grandfather during the Second World War. Adapted from Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, the film begins as an eccentric road movie and gradually becomes something more fragile: a story about memory, inheritance and the gaps families leave behind.

Elijah Wood plays Jonathan with awkward restraint, but the film is just as much shaped by Alex, his Ukrainian translator and guide, played by Eugene Hütz, a Ukrainian-born frontman of gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello. Alex arrives in the film with gold chains, tracksuits, mangled English and absolute confidence in his own taste. He could have been a broad comic caricature, but Hütz gives him real sweetness. His performance keeps the film alive, funny and human, even as the journey begins to move toward more painful history.

The road trip is completed by Alex’s grandfather and the family dog, Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., turning the search into a strange, mismatched pilgrimage through the Ukrainian countryside. Comedy comes first: bad translations, cultural misunderstanding, clashing expectations. Slowly, the film lets the joke fall away and reveals what the journey has really been circling around.

Liev Schreiber’s film is interested in what happens when inherited stories meet real places. The Ukraine Jonathan imagines from family memory and old photographs does not line up neatly with the country he encounters. That dislocation gives the film its force. It treats the search for roots as something strange, funny, uncomfortable and incomplete.

Screening after LUXEMBOURG, LUXEMBOURG, EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED closes Wednesday’s Family Baggage pairing with a story about absence, myth and the long road back to a place you only partly understand.

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/