As part of the Curious Affection film program, GOMA Cinémathèque will be playing host to a double feature screening of both the original Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049. That’s two sci-fi icons in one day!

Los Angeles 2019: a rainy dystopia choking with neon. Ex-policeman Rick Deckard returns to service to hunt and terminate illegal bio engineered replicants. Created by humans, these replicants are treated as aliens, slaves with a four year life span, manufactured to help populate space. Deckhard hunts four fugitives, who return to Earth in their own existential quest for personal freedom. Based on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, director Ridley Scott’s characters, both human and machine, raise questions about the nature of humanity and what constitutes natural as opposed to artificial. Undermining the distinction between the real and the simulated, Blade Runner exists in a world where cyborgs can display more humanity than the humans who hunt them.

Thirty years after the events of the first film, Blade Runner 2049 sees a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K (Ryan Gosling), unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos. K’s discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a former LAPD blade runner who has been missing for 30 years.