Belarus-born director Darya Zhuk will follow her debut film “Crystal Swan” with “Exactly What It Seems,” a dark sci-fi satire about contemporary authoritarianism.
The film – produced by Volia Chajkouskaya and Ivo Felt (Estonia) of Allfilm and Violetta Krechetova – is based on the original short story by Tatsiana Zamirovskaya, who will act as co-author. It will be shot in Belarusian, English and Russian.
Allfilm, co-founded by Felt, is also behind the Oscar-nominated “Tangerines” and Klaus Häro’s “The Fencer,” which was nominated for a Golden Globe.
In “Exactly What It Seems,” married couple Nadia and Fedor seek political asylum in the United States. But suddenly they are teleported back to Belarus by a mysterious quantum technology developed by scientists under the dictatorial regime. In the forests of their homeland, they are hunted like criminals and must repair their troubled relationship in order to return to safety.
“It’s not an effects-heavy film, but a grounded version of our reality with one assumption: that this technology exists and anyone who has nostalgic memories of Belarus can be instantly teleported back. However, it seems to work only in one direction, since only Belarusian memories are stored on the server,” Zhuk said. diversity.
“Unfortunately, this technology is the worst nightmare for some. My protagonists are wanted in their home country for political activism, so it is not safe for them to return there.”
Together with Tatyana Zamirovskaya, Zhuk decided to use the genre to “tackle” issues that would be difficult to digest in a more realistic drama.
“Satire and science fiction are great at creating just the right distance from the harsh reality of the current dictatorial regime and exploring the recent emotional trauma of a failed revolution in Belarus in 2020. We also want to make this story accessible to a wider audience who may not know anything about current events,” Zhuk said.
Belarus had previously nominated Zhuk’s 2018 drama “Crystal Swan” for the Oscars in the category of “Best Foreign Language Film”. It is about a young DJ in the 1990s who hopes to realize her American dream. It was the country’s first entry in 22 years.
“It opened many doors,” she recalls.
Since then, she has written and directed for Apple TV+, FX/Hulu, Netflix (crime drama “Zato”) and Amazon Europe (“Russian Affairs”), with some of that work – like Apple’s “Little America” – being “quite personal,” she noted.
“When producing ‘Crystal Swan’, my team and I reinvented the process of how to produce a film without the support of the local film fund. With this project, we want to try again – on a larger scale and in a tougher political climate.”
“Exactly What It Seems” will be “in conversation” with her previous work.
“It touches on the tortured relationship with my homeland and the cracks in the American dream as experienced by new immigrants,” said Zhuk, who studied film at Harvard University and then Columbia University.
“It’s a dystopian science fiction drama that deals with themes of toxic nostalgia and the search for identity against the backdrop of a totalitarian regime. I realize that my main character Velya in ‘Crystal Swan’ was also searching for her identity, lost between the abyss of being from Belarus and yet wanting to be free in America. Only now there is an even deeper need to examine the core of who you are and your deepest fears.”
Belarus-born, Estonia-based producer Volia Chajkouskaya was selected for this year’s Match Me! initiative in Locarno and is also developing Mono, about a woman trying to understand what happened to her when she lost half of her hearing as a teenager
“I am so excited about this project,” said Chaikouskaya, who was blacklisted by the Belarusian regime. “It is about my home country Belarus, where I have not been for five years, and it deals with current and universal themes such as totalitarian regimes, displacement and identity.”
“It’s a fantastic team – and fantastic professionals – that I’ve known for many years and whose work I simply admire. I’m convinced that we will find the resources to get this project off the ground as quickly as possible.”
