7

Plot elements:

  • Families live underground, contact is forbidden, but the protagonist kids want to meet and eventually also escape to the surface, which seems to be a desert.

  • The air is breathable, contrary to what they are told.

  • The boy and girl communicate through a big screen, which takes up almost the whole wall. (As do the aduls too with other adults of other groups/families.)

  • It's probably a dystopian sci-fi, so tunnels instead of caves and no magic.

  • I very faintly remember some kind of slide/capsule system for transportation, but this might just be my brain trying to come up with details that are simply incorrect.

I saw this in Hungarian sometime in the early 90s (not in a cinema, so it's probably made in the 80s). So this could be a B-movie, a direct to VHS TV show, or who knows what.


It's not City of Ember.

10
  • Are you sure it's not City of Ember? :-)
    – Valorum
    Jun 28, 2019 at 22:18
  • Welcome to Science Fiction & Fantasy! This question is very terse (and tropey) and would be greatly improved by going through the checklists here; How to ask a good story-ID question? to identify anything else you can remember about the film, its actors, dialogue, setting, etc
    – Valorum
    Jun 28, 2019 at 22:23
  • I wanted to double check before it turns out I'm a dum-dum, but the City of Ember novel was published in 2003, huh. Sureness preserved :) Alas I don't remember much - and I fear that adding anything else would just make people try to filter out their guesses. :(
    – PAStheLoD
    Jun 28, 2019 at 22:24
  • 2
    We're usually pretty good at considering that not all details are correct, so please provide any detail you can. If you're not certain on a point, just say as much.
    – FuzzyBoots
    Jun 28, 2019 at 22:45
  • 1
    Elements of this match Logan's Run
    – Valorum
    Jun 28, 2019 at 23:38

1 Answer 1

6

I've already answered a similar question someplace else, so I might as well put it up here too.

This matches all the plot elements of Fuga dal paradiso (AKA Flight\Escape from Paradise), an obscure Italian sci-fi film from 1990. From an IMDb review:

[A ]film that takes place sometime in the future after an ecological disaster has occurred. [...] The tale concerns two young people, Teo and Beatrice, whom live apart in an underground vault. Their separation is not by choice however, since this vault is governed by a computer named Harry - it decides which males and females are compatible to be paired together. Of course, Teo & Beatrice are very much in love and wish to be together, but doubt whether Harry will give them its blessing. The two can see each other on view screens, and neither having seen the outside world, only experience a limited controlled version of it through holographic simulations, in one scene it appears Teo is running on a tread-mill while Beatrice is running along a field on-screen [...] Together with the help of a robot (think Buck Rogers '81 season two) Teo and Beatrice find a way out of their designated sectors to the ruined world above.

Also tunnels are involved, IIRC they can breathe the air after all, etc. Here are the two progtagonists:

enter image description here

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