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Director's Statement
This is a purely fictional story; I made it up from beginning to end. I was inspired by a short story by Dostoyevsky, which bears the same title and which Dostoyevsky himself called a “fantastic story”. It tells of the relationship between a torturer and his victim, narrated by the torturer. In my fantasy, the victim retains her role of a victim, while the torturer is not personified by one single character, but takes on a somewhat different shape – the sadistic qualities are distributed among a multitude of characters, and the physical space in which the victim exists is itself menacing and aggressive.
More than 150 years separate Dostoyevsky's story and my film. The country has changed, people have changed, but the level of reflection remains the same. My narrative line is very different from Dostoyevsky's. My film is set in the present, and this period dictates the story’s plot and climax. In this sense Dostoyevsky's short story and my film have almost nothing in common, the title aside. At the same time, just like Dostoyevsky's text, my film is a fable about a victim and her tormentors, born and narrated - if I may use a figure of speech congenial to the place where the story takes place - by its author’s “inflamed imagination”. It should also be noted that the film does not share much with the oeuvre of Bresson, except for the title. Bresson is preoccupied with the psychology of a singular intimate relationship, whereas I'm fascinated by the nature and physiology of violence endemic to a particular place and its inhabitants.
A woman living in a Russian village works at the petrol station of an industrial plant. One day a parcel she sent to her husband, who is serving a prison sentence, is sent back to her marked ‘return to sender’. The only way to find out why the parcel was not delivered is to travel to the prison in a remote part of the country and seek information there. Thus begins a story of humiliation and violence; the story of a battle against an impenetrable fortress, which suppresses and enshrouds in thick mist everything and everyone who sets foot on its grounds. Due to its nature – a place one can easily enter, but of which one can know nothing without actually having penetrated it fully – the prison is seen as both a place of mystical power and a cruel exterminating machine. The paradox is that such a prison is created by those who are themselves destined to become convicts and to be devoured by its dark forces. Having experienced all sorts of humiliations, both physical and psychological, the heroine falls into a state of despair. She can see her future clearly, even if it seems too absurd to be real…
One might imagine from this description that the film will have the qualities of a philosophical essay or an allegory. This is not at all the case. On the contrary, the story is densely populated with ordinary people, easily found in the sort of fictional space I am describing, and who take very little care and give very little thought to their own actions. Indeed, what's there to think about when one has to survive! There is nothing extraordinary in the actions of these people and the way they live their lives; one can hear stories like theirs at any bus stop or train station, where people gather to wait for their transport and, bored and tired of waiting, begin to share anecdotes of things which have happened to them. These anecdotes are told in a colourful language, fairy-tale style, and they underpin the story, lending a burlesque aspect to the dramatic narrative.
As the stories I'm telling are ordinary, the visual language I will use to narrate them will also be rather ‘lifelike’, almost documentary in style. This will give these stories a feel of everyday, casual occurrence, which seems so shocking.
How terrible casual evil is! And how terrible is the casual attitude displayed by people, by the accidental witnesses. How tolerant we are of lies and evil, because our survival instinct tells us to pretend not to notice them. How ready we are to join in with the collective ecstasy of living through your own crimes, as if that were the only possible form of existence.
I plan to shoot the film in Latvia, in the city of Daugavpils. There’s a beautiful old prison still standing there, like an impenetrable fortress inside which our own unpredictable future could be waiting for us. This is the impression this prison can make upon the accidental and impressionable passer-by, whose life experience suggests that the essence of all fantasies is reality itself.