RELEASE DATE: 2020
SYNOPSYS
A young girl named Mila doesn’t notice that she is under surveillance 24/7. As she comes home one day, she’s being kidnapped. The unknown abductors keep her in an old garage, talk to her through a loudspeaker and set strict rules: she must not sleep but has to fulfill weird tasks that they’ve prepared for her. It all looks like someone’s sick ideas and gloomy entertainment. Still, the girl doesn’t suspect that she’s part of a ruthless experiment.
CAST
POLINA DAVYDOVA, EVGENIY GAGARIN, SERGEY TOPKOV, ANDREY TERESHENKO
DIRECTED BY PAVEL KHVALEEV
PRODUCED BY FRANK ELLRICH, ELENA TALYANSKAYA, GEORGIY SMIRNOV, EVGENIYA MUSTAFINA
ASSOCIATE PRODUCERS: MICHAEL KRAETZER, NICOLAS ONETTI
WRITTEN BY ALEXANDRA KHVALEEVA
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: PAVEL KHVALEEV
PRODUCTION DESIGN BY OLEG MUSTAFIN, MARIA PUSHKOVA, EVGENIA ZAKHAROVA
UCM.ONE & BLACK MANDALA 2020
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
It is perfectly clear to everyone that contemporary society has crossed the red line of impunity and the borders between the do’s and don’ts ceased to exist long ago for a certain social unit – those who selected the dark side of the Internet.
If you watch “Sleepless Beauty” film, you’ll have a chance to observe an allusion for a sacrifice, which shows how consciousness of a virgin girl was used and then destroyed in favor of a very subtle weapon from the psychological point of view.
By design, due to intervention into the brain division responsible for face recognition, the identification process is disturbed and the visible image for the examinee is fully replaced.
We decided to create this story when learned about one medical case, which occurred in October 2012, when a patient saw completely different face features of the doctor due to irritation of some temporal lobe zones.
But in this story, the surgical operation itself is not so important as its background. For the physical intervention the personality shall be fully devastated and consciousness should be able to accept a new image instead of the former one. Only then the substitution process will be completed successfully. Dramatics of this situation lies in the fact that the selected sacrifice dies by the most loved one’s hand. This is a superweapon of our age.
The videos demonstrated to the main lady character during the entire confinement period were carefully selected. They include fully assembled and animated images of body pieces, photo inserts, animal parts and many other things obtained just from the Internet space. The author of this work is Yakov Ivanusa, a Ukrainian artist.
Working on the musical part I wished the audience feel a real anxiety. Each sound underlines the condition of strain and hopelessness experienced by the main lady character.
As a whole, the movie concept shoes that everyone may turn out to be a lamb on the sacrificial table of the today technologies.
