2019 | Fiction | 7 min. | Russia
Thorough examination of poetic character of women put in modern society constraints.
Directors Statement
Femento is a movie that wants to explore poetic image of women on the verge of art and modern society. Seeing a woman on cinema screen is always a paradox: emotional and logical, existential and earthy, good and bad. Femento tries to answer the question about the position of women in contemporary culture. Will an image of a woman stay coherent and continuous if you take her out of her day-to-day life and place her in an empty box? In this movie we try to understand whether it’s possible to detach the image of woman from her daily routines in the era of ‘cold’ postmodern and metamodern society. Every woman is a distinct coordinate system of meanings. To get rid of obstructions and unify the environment for the film, we have to remove any women’s clothes. Every woman has the same dildo in her hands. It is merely a symbol to represent the society’s take on women. The dildo penetrates the cultural norms and stigmas, and women in Femento always try to direct it into the target—the projection of their own internal desires while being constrained and pressured by people around them. The dildo also means that we’re still living in man’s world, and to achieve goals, a woman must still act manly. Femento chooses black and white setting to drastically flatten differences and hide unnecessary details in characters of depicted women. The color would distract the viewer from the main point of view—the metaphysical meaning of voiced opinions, fears, and thoughts. The white environment is the final touch when it comes to the trinity of formation for the movie: white environment, black and white colors, no clothing. Women’s bodies and monologues become the main part of the movie, and everything else acts as a lense to emphasise the idea of woman as a central piece of it. The monologues of actreses themselves are the actual representation of meta-modern thinking process during our everyday routine. Every speech outlines the personal cage for the woman. While throwing the dildo into the target, they show us how they want to achieve their own life goals. Throwing the dildo is a manifestation of how woman is embedded into the modern society and how the latter might create a thoughtful prison for the former.
Director: Arseny Nazaruk
Producer: Daniel Vershinin
Сast: Aleksiia Belavina, Natalia Upolovnikova, Alina Beliaeva, Kristina Paul and Leia Sidorenko
