An avant-garde drama by Necrorealist artist Yevgeny Yufit and Vladimir Maslov about a documentary filmmaker who turns into his film’s protagonist.
A lonely director (played by the film’s co-creator, director and screenwriter Vladimir Maslov) is sitting in a simple wooden house and watching his footage. He is silent. Eerie shots of unknown men, a dead body floating on the river, and mysterious scenes from life are projected onto the wooden walls. The stream of images, which look more like photographs than a documentary, will, quite literally, captivate their author’s mind and make him act.
In this film, everything is slowed down—from the pace of the scenes to the characters’ reactions and the development of the narrative in space and time. The Wooden Room is an experimental meditation on the complex and ever-changing relationship between a documentary filmmaker and their characters.
Yevgeny Yufit is a filmmaker, artist, and photographer, one of the founders of Soviet «parallel cinema» and the founder of Necrorealism. The Wooden Room is an expression of the principles of Necrorealism not only in film but also in photography. Yufit used film as a source of inspiration for his photographic experiments: for example, he shot scenes on 16 mm film and used a darkroom enlarger to create his famous photographs and triptychs. As film critic Sergei Dobrotvorsky when the film premiered at the Moscow International Film Festival, «Yevgeny Yufit has shot his film as an endless photographic exhibition, where the plot develops not within one episode but from one episode to another, and where every frame can be exhibited as a separate work.»
The film will be screened in Russian with Russian subtitles.
The Wooden Room
Directors: Yevgeny Yufit and Vladimir Maslov
Russia, 1995. 65 min. 18+