2025 | Fiction | 13 min. | Russia
Lera is going to lie to her parents again, painting a picture of a successful actress, despite secretly she works as a prominent BDSM dominatrix. All she needs to do is get through New Year's Eve with her family. But keeping her lie alive becomes impossible when she realizes that her last "client", who she has just returned from, was none other than her own father.
Directors Statement
The story behind the film "Space Monkey" was born, as it often happens, from a personal experience that at first seemed almost anecdotal. It all began with casting for a classmate’s short film: we were looking for children to shoot scenes involving "space monkey" (a dangerous choking game). I constantly had to engage with parents, explaining in detail how the filming would proceed and emphasizing that the film carried not a negative, but rather a cautionary message. One night at 2 AM, I received a six-minute voice message from one candidate’s mother. She detailed every possible scenario of her daughter’s psychological trauma if the slightest mistake occurred on set. We auditioned over 500 children, and this experience of dealing with highly anxious parents became truly exhausting, leaving me with a sense of profound emotional burnout. All of this coalesced in my mind into a joke I’d tell friends. Yet, during one retelling of this joke, I suddenly realized what had gripped me so intensely and why I kept talking about it: I’d discovered a reflection of my own, deeply personal pain. Because this isn’t a story about wrong choices, but about how we treat those closest to us — about hearing without truly listening. That’s when I reached out to my fellow screenwriters from the course, and together we began transforming my experience into our shared creative project. And when the final dialogue between the protagonist and her mother came together, we cried—because we knew we’d written something truly important. I’m grateful to everyone who took part in this project, for it was these people who helped the film come to life and find its true voice.
Director: Nina Pikhodchuk
Producers: Nina Pikhodchuk, Anfisa Liaznikova and Dmitriy Kacher
Сast: Daria Otroshko, Alexander Ruzheynikov, Anna Karysheva, Nina Pikhodchuk, Alexander Gorodiskiy, Varvara Birukova, Nikita Kachula and Rustam Abidov
