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Director's Statement
FUGUE is inspired by a true story. A few years back, the main actress Gabriela Muskała (who also wrote the script) and I watched a TV program about a woman who couldn’t remember her name or where she was from, nothing. During the broadcast a family member called the studio claiming that he was her father. She didn’t recognise the man’s voice, she didn’t even remember that she had a family. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to meet them. We decided to visit this woman and find out how and why her old self and her old life had been erased from her memory. How had it happened that one day she left home and vanished for many months? Why was nobody looking for her? How was it possible that she forgot her own child? How did she manage to go back to her old life after such a traumatic experience? How did she deal with coming to terms with the fact that she had been somebody else and that one day her love for her husband and son vanished and she became a totally new person?
We found out that this woman was suffering from dissociative fugue disorder, a rare psychiatric condition that can manifest itself in unplanned travel, leaving the family home, partial memory loss and change of personality. In one moment a life becomes a blank slate again. We took this condition as the starting point for our character Alicja. She has the chance to create life anew and she uses this opportunity to the fullest and then is suddenly thrown back into her forgotten past life. In my previous film, THE LURE, I explored issues of female identity by means of experimenting with musical and horror genres. In FUGUE, I focused on recreating the internal world experienced by Alicja, which is often dreamlike, surreal, and uncanny.
When I create a movie, a crucial part of my process is taking inspiration from paintings and photography. Here, I was drawing from the works of the Polish painter Alex Urban and American photographers: Brookie Didonato, Cristina Coral and Evelyn Benicova. The archetypes of female subjugation and redefining women’s role in society are the core of their work. To me, the story of Alicja touches on the themes of the essence of identity and personal freedom. To what extent is our thinking about ourselves, influenced by our environment and our past.