‘They lived happily ever after and died together one day’, that’s how all the love stories I used to listen to as a child end (* Russian variant). But what’s the ending of these ‘love stories’ in reality?
Romanticization of love’s notion and its dispute with harsh reality are the baseline for the film that takes an in-depth look at how and what extent the cultural image of love designates our consciousness. In this visual manifesto I aim to recreate an idealized image of an imperfect relationship, using the romantic aesthetic.
Turning to my personal experience I consider the romantic relationship of two people based on the example of my parents. When I was little, they loved each other, as a teenager, they broke up, now that I’m an adult, they’re together again, with the experience of what they’ve been through before.
The film analyses almost invisible difference between myths and reality in our heads and combines for this documentary footage with hyperbolic staged romantic scenes.
2020
HABITAT
documentary, 2020, 64 Min, trailer
Grandmother of Zoya Mikhailovna was born in Finnish territory. In 1937, this was sufficient reason to upset the father of the little Zoya.
Sami culture in the Soviet Union and today's Russia is a source of life tests and struggle.
The film moves in the free-flowing memory tracks of a small indigenous people and tries to create a common memory image of the past 100 years
from the diversity of the protagonists.
The focus of the film narrative is the Russian territory of their homeland "Lapland", which is now divided between four countries.
Together with Zoya 18 Sami people of Kola Peninsula recall their past life memories in film. The past and the present flow into each other.
However, you can feel a huge gap between "today" and "yesterday".
In this short video essay I turn to my children's memories and reconstruct my own picture of childhood shaped by the endless visual elements of the Soviet era.
Born in 1986, I lived in a world soaked in nostalgia for the USSR, a country that only existed when I was four years old. However, my reality was filled with Soviet children's books, toys, films about pioneers and many subsequent dreams and fantasies, such as the romance of the cosmos and the escape into a colourful fairy-tale world.
“Day & Night” is a homage to childhood that I dreamed of and that I was only allowed to experience imaginatively based on the cultural remains.
2016
SNOWFLAKES
16mm short film
2014
DOWNWIND
Once I got in my hands a model of embryo at the age of 10 weeks. I really liked this plastic baby, as it was made of the same ordinary plastic the majority of children dolls are made of. I first realized that a doll as well is nothing but a model of a child at different ages and that this embryo is just one link in the chain of models. That became the main metaphor of the film the parallel between dolls and unborn children. The topic of abortion is partly a taboo in our society: it is kind of unpleasant and inappropriate to talk about. And at the same time, it is the issue many women have to face.
