Bitch

Colour, 35mm
Russia, 2001, 18 min
Section: Documentary Films in Competition

Synopsis

The director describes his attempt to express the experience of war in the following words: “War, death, infinite pain. War has always been eternal. And there is nothing remarkable nor strange about that. War is in the order of things. It’s considered commonplace that a brother kills his brother... And above everything is the Lord. His inscrutable will. The events recorded took place in Chechnya, but outside the political environment. These are just people who laughed, spoke and died Everything that happens unfolds in Hell. This is Hell anno Domini 2001.” In suggestive images, the film mediates the physical and spiritual state of soldiers under permanent and unforeseeable threat. The behaviour and responses of the group under observation are conditioned by suppressed fear and the will to survive. The theme of their provisional existence and insecurity is intensified by coarse humour, voices from transmitters, the sound of distant gunfire and flares in the night sky.

About the director

Igor Voloshin (b. 1974) hails from Sevastopol where he worked in the local theatre after studying acting at the State Theatre Institute in Yaroslavl (1996). He graduated from a course in writing and directing documentary and television films at Moscow´s VGIK film school (2000). Films: Slush (Myesivo, 2000), and Bitch (Suka, 2001), which won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2001 Amsterdam IDFA.