EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED: Ukrainian Film Week at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

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. You can get a ticket to see both films with our discounted Double Film Pass.