Anastasia Nikolaenko

For the first time in her life Virineya is an ethnic Moksha woman who grew up in Moscow, meets Vasily, a man of her own nationality. She is an aspiring model who appears in cheap advertisements, he works at a garbage processing facility. On her days-off she likes to have a glass of cold beer, he enjoys playing tennis. They are very different, but they have a common land of their ancestors, where they have never been, as well as the endangered language of their people, which they speak but poorly…

In the film, the photo lab serves as a space of transformation and control. It's where slides belonging to my grandfather, an anesthesiologist, are printed. The film development and analog printing processes are juxtaposed with the operating table and hospital corridors: a sense of sterility and technological advancement, a symbiosis between medical practice and a hobby no less demanding of precise procedures.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Edik, the director’s grandfather, falls seriously ill. The strain aggravates his wife Ella’s dementia, and she begins keeping a diary to hold on to events as they slip away. After Edik’s death, Ella is left alone with a lifetime she can barely remember, continuing to write things down so she can know for certain what happened. In the film, the director reads Ella’s diary, her voice gradually becoming an echo of her grandmother’s. It reverberates through empty rooms, filled to the ceiling with traces of a long life together and the love they shared, entering into dialogue with VHS footage and slides from their travels. Images, words, and gaps in memory form a story of love, loss, and memory’s power to hold on to someone after they are gone.

After a bicycle accident, a traveler finds himself in the home of a girl he has never met. An attraction develops between them, gradually giving way to tension. Romantic intimacy turns into musical dissonance and collective psychosis, from which the protagonist struggles to escape.

A poetic video essay about the phantom topography of childhood and teleportation to ancestral family places through olfactory and mythic experiences. Its key location is Irganay, a submerged village in Dagestan.