Nataliya Ilchuk, a director who also doubles as an actress for the occasion, invites us to a very singular clubbing experience. A clubbing that would have emptied itself. “Who do you want to be?” asks a friend filming her. After a few doubts, she replies to the camera: “I would like to be myself”. The film will be careful not to outline the precise shape of that “myself”. We follow her in this investigation as she wanders with her friend and companion, a sort of mute and inverted alter ego, for a few days of summer 2019 in Lviv. We never leave the two artists in their thirties, either after a party or at a karaoke bar, crossing paths with characters like this half-friend half-potential buyer of her paintings, a clue pointing to an unwelcoming off-screen environment… Through games, conversations and sentences up in the air, the film sketches out moments of complicity and wavering between them, allowing situations to arise. Hesitations and laughter are exchanged back and forth between the two of them. In this clubbing, for these two women, it’s about what to do and who to be. And as the final loop suggests, to shoot. But shoot what? The street? Their people? What can still be preserved in this seemingly quiet city. Preserving what is possible while in the background we can make out the absent, invisible, but ongoing war. But for how long? A situation on hold, as the finale suggests.
Nicolas Feodoroff
