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.
