In the international producing team Ukraine is represented by Vitalii Sheremetiev and Natalia Libet, working together with Uljana Kim (Lithuania) and Nadia Turincev (France), who in turn worked with Kvedaravicius on his full-length documentary debut Mariupolis (2016), which premiered at Berlin Film Festival past year. Kim and Turincev have also worked on producing films by Serhii Loznytsia and a cult Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu respectively.
Stasis finished among the winners of the Ninth Competitive selection of State Cinema Agency and received financial support in the amount of 11,600,000 hryvnias; thus Ukraine has become the second major participant of this co-production after Lithuania. The film’s total budget is 1,140,000 euros.
The filming takes place in Ukraine, Greece, Turkey, Uganda, and Lithuania. Ukrainian specialists work at every stage. Thus, Viacheslav Tsvietkov is the lead camera operator, Marharyta Burkovska and Hanna Bilobrova perform the main female roles, and the music is made by the famous band DakhaBrakha and composer Anton Baibakov. Foreign actors are amateurs: Mehdi Mohammed is a refugee from Sudan, living in Athens; Rekesh Shaabaz is Turkish national, permanent resident of Berlin.
Stasis is a psychological drama, created through combination of live action and documentary cinema. The very notion of stasis (translated literally as “motionless”) was formulated in the days of ancient Greece to denote the equilibrium in which mutually opposite forces come together in a kind of stalemate, without any outward presentation.
According to the director, three cities – Athens, Odesa, and Istanbul – will become the film’s full-fledged actors. Still, interior scenes of Odesa’s part of the film take place in Kyiv, at the USfB’s (Ukrainian Society for the Blind) House of Culture – a historic building in the stile of Stalinist Empire on Lobanovsky Avenue. As producers say, they were able to furnish four locations at the House: a bathroom, a hospital, a concert and rehearsal hall, and the dwelling of Sofia, one of the characters (played by Marharyta Burkovska).
Judging by Kvedaravicius’s previous work, the new film will be at least visually interesting. Mariupolis was filmed in Mariupol during the spring of 2015 by the observation method – it is record of daily life, devoid of a coherent plot or a protagonist. In the scenes of poverty and devastated industrial landscapes Kvedaravicius finds beauty and high drama; this is not a hunt for exotic view, not a speculation on a hot topic, just the precision of optics. In general, Mariupolis is a convincing portrait of a very sophisticated city. Obviously, the director will try similar methods this time.
Mantas Kvedaravicius met with journalists, including The Day’s reporter, on the filming set, at USfB House.
What is the story of Stasis?
“I do not know it yet. It is created every day. Again, and again, and again. And I really wonder what the result will be.”
Can we say then that you improvise?
“Never.”
But you do have a certain goal, don’t you?
“I have no purpose, I have a process that is happening every day, and this, again, is very interesting.”
But when you applied for funding to State Cinema Agency, you had to write that it was a story of someone or something.
“Of course. But it was the story back then.”
And what was it back then?
“I wrote what I thought. But then I thought one thing, now I think differently. But the film is the same. It always comes back to what it was from the beginning. I invented some episodes five years ago, I wrote them and forgot about them... and now I go back to them and they become the same as I once intended them to be. But before that, I forgot them and changed them. It may as well be just as I had planned five years ago.”
Maybe, some of the producers know it?
“I hope someone knows, but I’m afraid this person is not here.”
Then let us go another way. Can you say why do you need this movie? After all, you are a social anthropologist, so can we assume that Stasis continues your research?
“Well, anthropology is everywhere. The directors I love are all anthropologists. By the way, one of the producers we have is an anthropologist too.”
Taking from your thought, it appears that any good film is anthropology in itself, isn’t it?
“Of course. You said it very well. Any good movie is not just about creating a story, but also about distribution of vital objects and their representations.”
So, it turns out that your research not a separate Ukrainian or Greek society, but the entire human race as it is?
“I do not know what human race in a universal sense is, I know there are specific things that mean something. When these things occur, no matter whether they do so on set or in real life, it is exciting – and hopefully, in our case it will be exciting not only to me, but also to those who will watch it.”
You are a documentary filmmaker. Have you previously had an experience with actors?
“I’ve had experience with people.”
Was there a challenge for you?
“Of course, there is a challenge. My challenge every day is to communicate with people. And we do this in different functions. The actor is a feature of interest to me, and, of course, it is always interesting relate to another person, and no matter who it is.”
But there are nuances.
“Yes of course. It is therefore particularly interesting to feel those nuances.”
Have you already developed a method of working with artists in the scene? Can you articulate it?
“Okay, I can do this, if you ask me to articulate... I am interested in people. I am scared when the actors become less human. When they abandon their unusual experiences everyone has accumulated. This is a kind of violence... Maybe there is another power, which can discover on film everything the person has accumulated to this day. This is, perhaps, another kind of violence, but it comes to me as a nuance of interaction with people and actors.”
Are you trying to uncover them this way?
“I do not know ... I’m not trying to uncover them, I try to understand them.”
Will you have purely documentary scenes in this film?
“I am also making a documentary here. And by making a documentary, I am making a live action film. I do not distinguish such terms”
Can one assume that there is a clear line now between live action and documentary films?
“It depends on who holds this distinction.”
But does this distinction exist for you?
“Not as a border, but as an edge. Made up by someone.”
Still, what are you expecting to get at the end of a journey that you started here?
“I do not expect anything.”
Maybe the finished film?
“Yes, at some point, it certainly will. Then it will be forgotten, and there will be something new.”
The Day’s FACT FILE
Mantas Kvedaravicius was born in Birzai, city in the North of Lithuania, in 1978. He holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology at Cambridge University, Master of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford University, and currently works as an assistant professor at the University of Vilnius. Founder (Vilnius, 2003) and a leading member of the archaeological company specializing in underwater research. His documentaries – short Barzakh (2011) and full-length Mariupolis (2016) – premiered and received awards at several film festivals from Berlin to Hong Kong.
