BORDERLAND VISIONS All-Day Film Pass: Ukrainian Film Week at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

ATLANTIS imagines eastern Ukraine after the war has ended, but refuses the fantasy that peace means repair. Valentyn Vasyanovych sets the film in 2025, in a Donbas landscape scarred by conflict, industry and environmental collapse. The shooting has stopped, but the damage remains in the soil, the water, the factories and the people left behind.

The film follows Sergiy, a former soldier trying to live inside a country that no longer seems built for ordinary life. He works, drifts, and eventually joins an exhumation mission recovering the bodies of those killed during the war. Vasyanovych films this world with long, still compositions that give every landscape and interior a brutal clarity.

ATLANTIS won Best Film in the Orizzonti section at Venice and became one of the defining Ukrainian films of the years before Russia’s full-scale invasion. Seen now, its near-future premise feels less speculative and more like a warning delivered early. It understands war as something that outlives the battlefield.

Opening Saturday’s Borderland Visions of Ruin program, ATLANTIS gives the day its first image of a damaged landscape. It screens before BAD ROADS and PAMFIR, forming a contemporary Ukrainian sequence about war, territory, survival and the bodies left to carry history.