WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: Women In Film Fest @ FOMO Cinema Tbilisi
Sunday 5. April at 16:00 - 18:11
FOMO Secret Cinema, Tbilisi
Mike Nichols | 1966 | USA | 2h11m | English language with English subtitles
VIRGINIA WOOLF is film #22 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.
Mike Nichols’s WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? takes place over a single long night, after a faculty party, when Martha and George bring a younger couple back to the house and begin dragging them into their private rituals of humiliation and psychological warfare. Adapted from Edward Albee’s play, the film keeps the language vicious and the setting close, but Nichols uses the camera to turn that domestic space into something unstable and punishing. What begins as drunken sparring becomes a sustained assault on marriage, masculinity, ambition, fantasy, and the lies people build their lives around.
Elizabeth Taylor is the reason the film hits as hard as it does. She took on Martha at a moment when her star image was still tied to glamour, then gave a performance built on appetite, cruelty, theatricality, self-loathing, and real pain. Richard Burton meets her line for line, but Martha dominates the room through sheer force of character. The film became famous for that collision, and for the fact that all four principal actors were nominated for Oscars. It also marked Nichols’ first feature, announcing him immediately as an adroit director who could balance big name Hollywood stars in one hand, and emotional violence in the other - all without letting the material lose its dark humour.
Part of what still makes this film so unsettling is that it never offers the audience a safe distance from the characters. It's funny, but the humour bites hard. It's theatrical, but never static. And beneath all the performance, insult, and role-playing, it keeps pressing on something raw: the fear of failure, the collapse of illusion, and the damage people do when they cannot bear the lives they have made.
WHY IT’S INCLUDED IN THIS WEEK’S PROGRAM: We’re showing WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? because it contains one of the most ferocious female performances in the whole film fest. Martha is impossible to ignore. The film does not try to make her palatable. It gives Elizabeth Taylor the space to be huge, ugly, magnetic, and devastating, and that alone makes it essential to a week like this.
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, 0105 Tbilisi, Georgia
