This film emerged from within a Russian enclave, amid the silence that now envelops it. At first, I only sensed the connection between place, death, childhood, and my own condition. My grandfather’s death – or rather, my subjective experience of it – became the impulse to break that silence and begin the film. The film, like a ritual, retraces my grandfather’s path from the town to the dacha. That is where my childhood was spent, in a small town on the Neman River, on the border with Europe. My childhood memories intertwine with the vanishing world of my grandfather, who himself has become a memory.

A day in the reality of late Russian capitalism. A courier moves under the control of maps and restrictions, unaware of where he is going or what he is searching for. Yet within him lives a feeling — something like nostalgia — that helps him resist reality. Amid the melancholy of the everyday, he starts collecting images of emptiness. Perhaps he is only playing the role of a courier, being in truth a poet of a city where growing up has become impossible.

Rather than adapting the novel itself, the film reimagines Andrei Bely’s writing process and his neurotic infatuation. What interested me was cinema as a process of its own becoming — the performativity of the relations it sets in motion, and the ways in which reality seeps into the deliberate artificiality of film. Here, the true directors are the actresses, while the director becomes the only actor.

In this film, I tried to capture the process of translating an image from the outer world into one preserved in consciousness – the gradual transformation of the visible properties of reality into sensation, impression, memory, projection, symbol, and finally into an act of meaning-making.

“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.

The human mind is capable of decoding raw sensations, thus doubling the world — perceiving only movement and repetition. The filmmaker may tell no story at all, but only explore what allows the world to reveal itself. I didn’t plan anything initially; I simply watched and waited to see what my phone would offer me to capture, and at what moment the film would be born.

The opening credits state that this film was made by shadows, colors, wind, camera, and sun. “This is a political film,” the filmmaker enters into a dialogue with himself.

A film does not require much: a black box of an apartment, a mirror, a look through the peephole and the view of the other – a cat outside the window, which sees something inaccessible to the film – the darkness captured by the cut. The director turns on the light, but the moment of death and birth of light is itself a mystery. A mystery where interframe and intraframe editing become indistinguishable.

The film is an unedited dv-camera session filmed by my mom on a trip. Then, far from home, she experienced panic attacks for the first time, but still captured for me these sad and only slightly joyful fragments of a foreign world.

This is an amateur and almost childish film about my friends, which I felt important to keep. I was shooting this film for two years on a Nokia n-72 phone.