Your film eludes definition: at once a study of the territory that gives it its title, the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, between Poland and Lithuania, a tribute to your grandfather, an evocation of your childhood… Can you trace its origins? What needs did it meet? What were your first impulses?
The origin was death. I returned to my childhood home, now emptied of my grandfather, in a state of mental exhaustion. My plans were collapsing, and the world around me was undergoing deep change. Filming became a kind of self-support—like keeping a diary in a moment of historical turbulence, a way to hold myself together. I began by simply observing the material traces of my grandfather’s world—a world I also recognized as the landscape of my childhood.
From the outset, the story reveals its dual temporality: that of reality filmed over the course of the shots, and that of the montage, the silent voice in the first person that you inscribe on the image. Can you comment on this approach?
The silent voice allows the act of representation to become visible. It shifts the focus to the process of the film becoming a film –a process that deeply fascinates me. For me, the substance of cinema is born at the border between method and reality, between what is shown and what is told, between image and imagination. The text, emerging within the temporal structure of the montage, is a way to enter into dialogue with the reality from which the film weaves itself—not mastering it, but listening to it. That’s why I avoided using voice over: instead, the commentary embedded the image itself, as part of its texture. I’m drawn to the idea that the filmmaker gives up their voice—becoming just one voice among others– all equalized through the shared space of subtitles. Moreover, the voice you hear reading the subtitles is your own.
The film is also torn between the contemporary context—the situation in Russia, the war in Ukraine, evoked in particular through the voice of television propaganda—and what looks like an attempt to escape it, through encounters that are like opportunities to return to childhood. But one encounter, towards the end, brings back the anguish of war. We sense a need to escape the present, and an attempt to produce a kind of timelessness, through beauty.
Yes, at the heart of the film lies a rupture between the desire to touch what is sensitive and painful, and the escapism imposed by both reality and an inner state—and the film exists around it. The film was also a way to reflect personal experience that are difficult to articulate: guilt, identity, memory, grief. I believe some things can’t be expressed in conventional ways. Sometimes, avoiding direct representation helps protect against the risk of being unethical or manipulative when approaching someone else’s pain. Sometimes, personal trauma shows itself through what we choose not to say. For example, in a sincere refusal to speak about war except through a quiet undercurrent of anxiety. Cinema is full of things that emerge beyond the director’s control, which is why I never feel entirely certain about my own intentions. I just try to stay honest with myself.
As for beauty—you’re right. Life is very short, and I don’t see much reason to make films from anything other than love: love for beauty, for the world, for different states of being, for different ages, for time shared with others or time spent alone, for mystery. For me, filmmaking is the act of expressing that love—without which, much of life loses its meaning.
A date, only one, is mentioned at the beginning: 1 May 2024. What is its significance?
On that day, my grandfather would have turned 87. It’s also the only holiday that holds real meaning for me—International Workers’ Day, a celebration of global solidarity. That day, I realized which image should open the film, and the editing process began.
At the end of the film, you reveal a little about your shooting method: “fragments” collected day by day—we can guess that there was no real writing or shooting plan. But the text still reveals a journey: from the family flat where you grew up, to your grandfather’s dacha. You also mention everything you chose not to keep. Can you comment on this fragmentary dimension, and the way in which you have nevertheless constructed a narrative?
It’s like writing a poem—guided by a feeling, a direction that’s hard to articulate, and an inner state. At some point, I decided that the story would follow a kind of topography: by a route through familiar places, which became the film’s structure. But it’s not a story in the usual sense—more a sequence of pauses, moments of stillness, landscapes seen, spontaneous encounters with people who became characters, visual rhymes discovered like ready-mades. The film is a living process—an unpredictable and sometimes painful one, but also an adventure, where every meeting may create something new. Even if a script exists, the story is always reimagined during the making. Sometimes cinema is not just a way to tell a story, but a way to shift its direction—to uncover something alive at its core. For me, the more uncertain, risky, and fragmentary the process, the more exciting it is to assemble the pieces—to search for meaning or accept its absence. I think this impulse comes from my post-Soviet childhood and a game I invented as a kid called “Ragamuffins”: collecting fragments of the world—discarded objects, scraps—and endlessly recombining them into new constellations. I have a short text about this game, which could serve as a kind of personal filmmaker’s statement. [https://wildlakes.tilda.ws/Texts#rec268712852]
The image alternates between very wide, fixed shots of the landscape—the buildings, the river, the small human silhouettes in the background—and a highly mobile hand-held camera, often tightly focused on motifs, to the point of abstraction. What did you try to capture in your shots, day after day?
Each frame—its tone, its distance from the world and from the people in it—finds its own rules every time. It’s a tool of cinema, yes, but one that feels very natural to me. There’s a wide landscape shot of the Queen Louise Bridge at the edge of Russia and Europe, with boys far in the distance. And then the next shot brings us close to them—intimate, handheld, involved. Between those two moments, something changed. We had gotten to know each other. They asked what I was doing, and I invited them to keep spending time as they were, but only now with the camera watching. That shift in connection shaped how the image looks—how it feels. I’m interested in these delicate vibrations in the mood of the world, and the camera helps me to translate them. The film is documentary, but it’s not neutral or detached. There’s no conventional storyline or characters, but there is an experience of presence, of encounter, of subjectivity that I want to share with the viewer.
The image constantly seems to be affected by a kind of veil, which puts reality at a distance. Low definition plays an essential role in the work on the image and the light. What equipment did you use? Can you tell us about your work with light and your research into the texture of the image?
I’ve been exploring lo-fi digital imagery for quite a while and it’s the foundation of all my short films. I’m particularly drawn to using Nokia phone cameras or vintage digital devices pushed to their limits, especially in low light. Their limitations open up more space for imagination than precision ever could. They often reveal more about our time than polished digital or analogue equipment ever could. This time, I was aiming to evoke both the sensuality of poor eyesight and the hazy texture of memories tied to familiar places, while keeping the soundscape extremely physical and grounded. I used two cameras: the original Blackmagic Pocket and the legendary DV camcorder Panasonic AG-DVX100B. For the Blackmagic, I assembled a DIY lens—by cutting and merging a Soviet Industar 50mm with a zoom optic block from an old Soviet movie camera. This charming zoom lens, which covered all the focal lengths I needed, cost me just ten euros.
Interview by Cyril Neyrat
