TO DIE FOR: Women In Film Fest @ FOMO Cinema Tbilisi
Friday 3. April at 21:00 - 22:46
FOMO Secret Cinema, Tbilisi
Gus Van Sant | 1995 | USA | 1h46m | English language with English subtitles
This is film #18 in FOMO’s extended Women in Film Week, a program built around female performance, female subjectivity, and the many ways women’s stories are written, performed, directed, and brought to life on screen.
Gus Van Sant’s TO DIE FOR follows Suzanne Stone, a small-town weather presenter who treats television not as a job but as a her destiny. Adapted from Joyce Maynard’s novel and structured as a mock-documentary, the film pieces her story together through interviews, confessions, and media fragments. That structure matters. It lets Suzanne control her own image while also exposing the gap between the version of herself she performs for the camera and the damage she leaves behind. The film anticipates a culture shaped by visibility, self-presentation, and the need to be seen at any price.
Nicole Kidman is the real reason the film works as more than satire. She plays Suzanne as someone who has absorbed the language of television so completely and innately that every word out of her mouth sounds rehearsed and calculated. The smile, the pauses, the empty sincerity all become part of how she operates. Opposite her, Joaquin Phoenix (still credited as Leaf Phoenix at the time) gives one of his earliest and most unsettling performances as Jimmy, the teenage boy who mistakes Suzanne’s attention for love. He's not there to balance her, but show the human cost of her ambition.
What keeps TO DIE FOR alive is that it never reduces Suzanne to a simple villain. The film understands that her behaviour grows out of recognisable ideas about fame, image, and success. It's funny, cold, and often uncomfortable in the way it pushes those ideas to their logical end.
WHY IT’S INCLUDED IN THIS WEEK’S PROGRAM: I'm showing TO DIE FOR because it gives us one of the great female antiheroes of 1990s American cinema. Suzanne is ambitious, manipulative, and ruthless, and the film never asks us to excuse her. It also captures a moment when Nicole Kidman moved away from conventional roles and into something far more dangerous and memorable.
LOCATION: FOMO Secret Cinema, Bazari Orbeliani, Tbilisi. A five minute walk from Liberty Square metro.
HOW TO FIND FOMO: Enter the Bazari via Atoneli St above Carrefour and take the stairs on your left as soon as you enter next to the karaoke booth. FOMO is one flight up. Video instructions here: https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17933106294029235
T&Cs: Guests must enter the Bazari by 23:00 to gain access to the FOMO Cinema Lounge Bar. If the Atoneli St entrance is locked you can get in via the side entrance on Sulkhanishvil St between 21:00 and 23:00. We close at 02:00 each evening. No refunds are issued unless we cancel the screening ourselves.
FOMO Secret Cinema • Bazari Orbeliani stairwell, 0105 Tbilisi, Georgia
