The Sound of Waves

A man wakes up, cleans up, dresses himself and sets a kettle on. He looks though the window, observes a hunting cat; prepares and proceeds with the breakfast. The light turns on twice: without and with the cut.

Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave stuck like a knife in the heart of Europe. Camera in hand, the filmmaker retraces his grandfather’s steps. As he strolls along, one encounter follows another, fragments of lives suspended in the shadow of war and censorship.

A fairy tale is not a metaphor or an allegory: everything in it is literal. There are strange fairy tales and tales written in kid tongues, untranslatable ones. They don't have morals, but they do have shapeshifting and bewitchment. Your favorite fairy tale is a self-fulfilling prophecy or an inverted one. “Tales” is a dedication to lost films assembled from fragments, films that were rotting in attics, born in the era before Griffith and were cut off suddenly. I achieved the effect of pure affirmation with images whose nature and logic almost cannot be grasped, like a dream or first memories. It can be said, that these are fairy tales from the early childhood of cinema, such as I remember them.

Two fugitives spend their final days together, wandering along indeterminate borders amidst deserts and tides, ruins and makeshift shelters. In a world where the concept of home no longer exists, their unsettling journey begins to resemble—all at once—a forced displacement, a guerrilla-like existence, an escape from reality, and a funeral procession. The film counters the conventional expressive functions of mise-en-scène and editing with radical slow motion and double exposure. Drawing on techniques that emerged at the dawn of cinema, it shifts the focus from the characters' story to the very fabric of their ghostly presence: gestures, touches, the play of light, landscapes, the sound of the surf, and digital noise.

Brecht's hero navigates non-places of a modern city. He has a smartphone that receives different messages, and a smartphone camera that sometimes shoots something. Thus political escape turns into a dream.

Experimental short film based on the last line of William Shakespeare's Sonnet VIII