BAD ROADS - Ukrainian Film Week at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

BAD ROADS follows four stories set around the roads of Donbas, where war has broken the normal rules of movement, trust and human behaviour. Adapted by Nataliia Vorozhbyt from her own stage work, the film looks at checkpoints, occupied spaces, damaged relationships and the strange moral weather created by life near the front.

The film doesn’t present war through large battles or spectacle. It focuses on encounters: a school principal stopped at a military checkpoint, teenage girls drawn toward soldiers, a journalist trapped in a horrifying situation, and a woman trying to make sense of casual violence after her car hits a chicken. Each episode shows how quickly ordinary life can become unstable when power resides in the wrong hands.

Vorozhbyt is one of Ukraine’s most important contemporary playwrights and screenwriters, and her ear for speech gives the film its force. Conversations begin with jokes, flirtation, suspicion or awkward politeness, then shift into something more dangerous.

Screening after ATLANTIS and before PAMFIR, BAD ROADS sits at the centre of Saturday’s Borderland Visions of Ruin program. It brings the landscape of war down to human scale: roads, checkpoints, rooms, cars, bodies, silences and decisions no one can fully escape.