What has influenced me as a filmmaker is my childhood in the post-Soviet landscape – the fairy tales my grandfather told me before sleep, the spell of stories once heard, the city outskirts, and the melancholy of dusk.

My approach is not to construct fiction, but to look into reality and work with what already exists within it – to create not a feature film, but a film situation, where characters, spaces, and events are not directed by the author’s will but emerge spontaneously from the real conditions of life.

What fascinates me in cinema is its self-reflective nature – the awareness of the medium itself, the reality beyond its frame, and the processual character of filming: when you stand in a familiar wasteland, camera running, staring into the void, and meanings arise performatively. This implies a dynamic rearrangement of the film’s structure, a living mobility of signs, a continuous shifting of the initial intention, and an openness of trajectories. It is not the story told, but the film itself, that becomes the experience.