LOGLINE

Masha leads a double life: in one she is a photographer, a mother, and a wife; in the other she is a medium who maintains daily contact with the subtle world of spirits using the electronic voice phenomena. One day Masha realizes that the spirit she has been communicating with for a year is actually a frontman of the band Kurara and truly falls in love.

SYNOPSIS

Thomas Edison wrote about the possibility of communication with the non-material world in 1920 in Scientific American magazine, and in 1959 in Sweden Friedrich Jurgenson discovered the 'electronic voice phenomena' - receiving audio messages from anomalous information sources on sound-recording and sound-transmitting devices. Since then, a huge number of people around the world have been practicing this method to contact deceased loved ones and other entities from the 'subtle world'.
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The main character, Masha, is 36 years old and lives in Cheboksary. She has an 11-year-old son, given to the upbringing of his grandmother, and a husband, a construction worker who often leaves home to earn money. Masha is happy about her husband's frequent departures-they have not understood each other for a long time.

The feeling of the 'subtle world' was with Masha since childhood and over time her passion for esotericism became more and more serious.

Now almost all of Masha's life is spent within the walls of the house. She is mostly awake at night when her husband is asleep, engaged in astral travel, reading auras of her Internet friends from photographs, taking pictures of entities from the 'subtle world' using reflections in water, and recording voices of the dead.

Masha's main interlocutor becomes a spirit for whom she has strong feelings. The incarnation of this spirit turns out to be the frontman of the famous musical group Curara, Oleg Yagodin.

Through the life of the heroine, cut off from ordinary everyday experience, the film tells a completely unusual love story.

TEASER

Author's intention

In the summer of 2019, after finishing my previous film, which I had had a hard time with, I decided to let myself rest. I was feeling a loss of energy, and the real life going on around me was not emotionally gripping me. I thought a lot, read Lovecraft, science fiction and fantasy. Other worlds were more interesting. When the reading and thinking revived me, I began to think about my next project, deciding to move towards documentary horror, which later turned into a drama.

I remember once I decided to watch Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead for inspiration. The first scene showed an Ouija board. And then suddenly I remembered the story of a friend of mine, that he knew people who practiced FEG (electronic voice phenomenon). This was the starting point.

I was lucky: Masha, a researcher of FEG, and her incredible love story to Oleg's 'spirit' I found immediately. At first we went together to the spiritist group, filmed her practices - reading auras on the phone, recording EVP, photoEVP, regressions, Tarot - we saw the outside of the film. Gradually we began to get to know Masha better. She used to be a great photographer. She has a son and a husband with whom Masha hasn't had an understanding for a long time. He is a construction worker and sometimes goes away on business trips for long periods of time.

Masha's story makes sense to me - there are a lot of similar women in Russia. Their desire to love remains unrealized. All meaningful events for her happen in her head, in her personally constructed and well-protected world, where there are bright colors, incredible experiences, experience of past lives and love for the 'spirit'.

Masha chose a radical way of escape - she went into her own fantasy world, where she has everything that is unattainable in reality. I interpret the story this way, though of course it is much more complicated, because the line between the world we are used to and something beyond is so blurred that we can hardly say with certainty where fantasy ends and something unexplored begins. In some ways, Masha and I are similar; surely many viewers will feel the same way.

Director

ALEXANDRA PUSTYNNOVA
‍Director

Born in 1987 in Altai region. In 2011 graduated from VGIK (V.P.Lisakovich's workshop of documentary films, A. Gelein). Since 2016 a drummer in an art punk band.

‍FILMOGRAPHY‍

‍Subtle World
‍documentary / 65' / 2022.

‍Secondary World
‍documentary / 118' / 2019 / 2020 National Beat Film Festival Grand Prize.

‍This Is Me
‍Documentary series / directed by A. Rastorguev, P. Kostomarov / 2017 / editing director.

‍Video works by contemporary artist Taus Makhacheva
‍video art / 2015-2020 / director and editor.

‍Intel.Russia documentary commercials
‍documentary / 2014 / director.

Indeterminate Form
‍documentary / 28' / 2014 / film studio Risk with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation.

‍Boys
‍Documentary / 28' / 2012 / film studio Risk with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, nominee for the National Prize Laurel Branch, Best Debut.

‍CRITZ
‍Documentary / 45' / 2011 / 35 mm / VGIK / Special Prize of the Film Festival Saratov sufferings, Special Screening at the Festival goEast - Festival of Central and Eastern European Film, Wiesbaden, Germany.

‍Place of Residence
‍Documentary / 28' / 2010 / HDV / VGIK.

PRODUCER’S NOTE

Alexandra Pustynnova attracted me with her project Secondary World, which won the national Beat Film Festival competition in 2020. I decided to look at her earlier works and made sure that I recognized a real documentary filmmaker with her own handwriting and unique approach to her characters. She has all the necessary skills to become one of the brightest documentary filmmakers in the Russian market and I am honored to assist her in this.

Our task now is to get funding to complete the film Subtle World, ensure it has a solid festival distribution, securing support from one of the leading Russian platforms. At this stage of implementation it is necessary to ensure the project support of colleagues, so that the next works by Alexandra Pustynnova will begin to grow within the industrial context, rather than outside of it, as it happened before - all projects of Alexandra Pustynnova developed independently, and no production companies were involved in them.

Mimesis joined this project at a late stage, when the footage was already shot. We hope that our participation in the project will help to bring this original and talented Russian author to a new level.

Mimesis for many years has built its activity through such authors who contain a certain dimension in themselves and in what they do. That dimension is mystical. This theme has always been close to us and this project is no exception. Only in the case of Subtle World now we rather resort to the analysis of how the mystical dimension reveals itself in the life of an ordinary person - a girl named Masha.

In general, Russia has proved by its entire culture an inexorable craving for the supernatural. This has always been especially pronounced in folklore and various folk beliefs. What the Subtle World narrates can be called a kind of transformation of the methods of search and affirmation in the beyond, but in fact it is the same traditional mystical beliefs, with the only difference that now it has resorted to the use of modern technology. Here, communication with spirits takes place through an audio recording or a phone camera - through interjections and fixed visual images.

The notion of some 'subtle world' (or similar to it) exists in many traditional cultures. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was popularized by theosophists, and later evolved into the hybrid, syncretic mystical current of New Age, thus becoming even more widely known in Russia and around the world.An appeal to the supernatural is often the last chance for salvation and simultaneously a marker that the last chance in the so-called reality has been exhausted. Unhappy love, a serious illness, the death of a loved one - these are the three main reasons for beginning a dialogue with the beyond. The person, unwilling to accept the inevitable, seeks refutation of the terrible reality in the phone-recorded murmur of water, playing it in a circle and finding in it the voices of someone whom he can no longer hear in the present world. The inability to go on as if to squeeze one between the real and the imaginary, between the possible and the impossible, between the manifest and the hidden.

The degeneration of the truly mystical into a desperate everyday experience, mind games, macabre dances, the bitterness of loneliness, illusions of love, fear of loss and of course the triumph of hope - we are convinced that in this film many facets of fundamental human properties can be found, and most interestingly, all this - in the documentary genre.

EVP

Instrumental transcommunication — communication by technical means with intelligent interlocutors living in realities beyond the perception of the five earthly senses.

EVP or Electronic voice phenomena — sounds detected on electronic recordings and interpreted as spirit voices that were either recorded unintentionally or deliberately requested and recorded.

contacts

Aleksandra Pustynnova
Director

iiiapito@gmail.com

Yanna Buryak
Producer
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yanna@mimesis.productions
+7 (964) 797 50 16