TETSUO + ELECTRIC DRAGON Double Bill | FOMO Secret Cinema Tbilisi - Asian Film Week

TETSUO: THE IRON MAN + ELECTRIC DRAGON 80,000 V

Saturday night is where Asian Film Week heads into the most confrontational corner of Japanese cinema. One ticket gets you two ferocious films from different generations of the country’s underground scene, both built around bodies, electricity, noise and filmmakers pushing low-budget genre cinema far beyond anything polite

TETSUO | Shinya Tsukamoto | 1989 | Japan | 1h7m | Japanese with English subtitles

TETSUO: THE IRON MAN is Shinya Tsukamoto’s 1989 cyberpunk landmark. Shot in grainy black-and-white 16mm over roughly 18 months with a tiny crew, the film became one of the defining works of Japanese underground cinema despite being made with almost no resources. Tsukamoto turns those limitations into part of the film’s identity. Stop-motion, frantic cutting, industrial sound and handmade effects make the film feel less like conventional horror and more like a physical attack.

The story is brutally simple. A salaryman begins transforming into metal, his body invaded by machinery until flesh and steel become impossible to separate. Tsukamoto was drawing from films like VIDEODROME and BLADE RUNNER, but TETSUO takes those anxieties somewhere far more intimate, sexual and grotesque. It is only 67 minutes long, yet its influence reaches through later cyberpunk, body horror, music videos and experimental genre filmmaking.

After a 15-minute intermission, we jump forward twelve years to ELECTRIC DRAGON 80,000 V, Sogo Ishii’s 55-minute blast of black-and-white punk cinema

ELECTRIC DRAGON 80,000V | Sogo Ishii | 2001 | Japan | 55mins | Japanese with English subtitles

Tadanobu Asano plays Dragon Eye Morrison, a man whose childhood electrocution left him able to channel enormous amounts of electricity through his body. He lives with reptiles, plays brutally loud guitar and eventually collides with another electrically powered outsider in a story that plays like a manga ripped apart and rebuilt as a noise-rock superhero film.

Where TETSUO is claustrophobic, anxious and grotesque, ELECTRIC DRAGON is playful, ecstatic and almost absurdly cool. Ishii shoots bodies, wires, guitars and city streets with the same raw energy Tsukamoto brought to machinery and flesh, but turns that aggression into something closer to a live concert..

Together, the two films show how much freedom existed at the edges of Japanese cinema when filmmakers stopped worrying about realism, polish or conventional storytelling. This is exactly the sort of Saturday night FOMO exists for: a cult double bill from the more confrontational side of Japanese genre cinema, presented together as one complete program.

ABOUT ASIAN FILM WEEK

Asian Film Week is exactly the kind of programming FOMO exists for: major classics, cult discoveries and films you rarely get the chance to see on a cinema screen in Tbilisi. This week has been curated with Denis from Ukraine, a FOMO Film Club lifetime member with a real passion for Asian cinema, whose recommendations helped fill some gaps in my own knowledge and pushed the programme in directions I might not have reached alone.

A lot of care has gone into making the week feel broad, balanced and genuinely worth exploring. You’ll find landmark films from directors already well known in the West alongside stranger, more underground work that deserves a much wider audience. If Asian cinema is already your thing, I hope there are still a few surprises here. If it isn’t, I hope this week gives you a great place to start..