Dieses Gespräch wurde auf Englisch geführt.
Barbara Wurm (BW): Welcome to the Forum, Ralitza, with your second feature film LUST. Ten years ago you won the Golden Leopard in Locarno with your debut film GODLESS (Bezbog). We are proud to host the world premiere of another very strong-minded film.
Ralitza Petrova: Thank you so much. It means a lot to me. Somehow it seems like a divine intervention that the film is coming back to Berlin. Because it started in Berlin. I was supported with this project by Nipkow Programm and the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Programme. I spent a year in Berlin writing it.
Christiane Büchner (CB): You mentioned in your director's note that the project has a personal starting point. Could you tell us more about the origins of your film?
RP: I grew up in the household of a single parent, my mom. I was raised by my grandfather and developed a strong connection with his war generation. In 2016, I lost my father, whom I’d seen a handful of times throughout my life. Growing up without a father shaped me in meaningful ways, not all of them negative. That core absence certainly took its toll, but it also gave me a great deal of resilience in a men’s world. From a very young age, I never felt intimidated by the patriarchy. LUST is told from a firmly female gaze. My intention was to approach it without sentimentality or explicit psychological explanations, even if that meant not reaching everyone. For me, it’s a mystical film about absent fathers and the daughters who carry that weight. How absence can break us, but also how it might open a new door.
BW: Could you talk about your other sources of inspiration?
RP: While there are films I feel close to, like JEANNE DIELMAN by Akerman, BATTL IN HEAVEN by Reygadas, or SHOPLIFTERS by Kore-eda, my main influences come from philosophy and conceptual art more than from film. For LUST it was texts from ‘Tao Te Ching’ by Laozi. It translates as ‘The Way’, which is the Daoist spiritual movement. Also, certain ideas from the ‘The Saviours of God’ by the Greek philosopher and poet Nikos Kazantzakis. It’s a very controversial text, which talks about our relationship to the higher power, proposing that salvation is not something bestowed upon us, but a responsibility we carry, to help bring the divine into being through our actions. It’s a masterpiece. So these texts were conceptual points of departure. While I was writing in Berlin, I spent a lot of time attending support group meetings for addiction. I listened to personal stories about battles with different forms of addiction: alcohol, drugs, sex and love, eating, shopping, social media. But as the Canadian physician Gabor Mate says ‘Don’t ask why the addiction, ask why the pain.’
I wanted to create a collective portrait of women that I don’t see much on screen. Throughout our lives, we are saturated by identifiers with the male hero at every stage of his development. The male archetype has long stood in for universal human experience – so familiar that it has become almost invisible.
BW: Wow, what an impressive reading list. Yet we conceived of the film as an extremely concise and precise – and maybe even hermetic – entity. Let’s focus on the transformation process – from your personal experience and autobiographical background to this other persona, your main character.
RP: When I was younger, I wrote poetry. So this transformation happened very naturally and intuitively. I started from that personal space that conveys a lot of contradictory emotions and feelings. So this character started to emerge, a character that I recognise in myself, but also in many of my female friends and women I see. I wanted to create a collective portrait of women that I don’t see much on screen. Throughout our lives, we are saturated by identifiers with the male hero at every stage of his development. The male archetype has long stood in for universal human experience – so familiar that it has become almost invisible. Growing up absorbing these archetypes I too grew up and moved through life observing the male-hero model. I reached a point where I felt so starved of my own authentic feminine nature, which I had been taught to see as subordinate – by extension denying the feminine nature of the universe as well. I craved a female character in transition. To witness that inner, private, hidden, and denied journey. To shed a light on a collective perception that has been shamed and demonized. I imagined an almost Jungian descent into an interior space, where reality, fiction, and fantasy merge into a portal for transformation. That’s how the character of Lilian emerged. Then I started looking for a woman whose sensitivity, intellect, and body could carry this story. And I was very lucky to meet Snejanka Mihaylova.
BW: A great actress! How big was her influence on the development of the character?
RP: Snejanka Mihaylova is a very special mind and soul to me. She is a writer and performance artist with a PhD in philosophy, and she deeply connected with the project and what I wanted to explore. When the time comes, perhaps she could share her own take on the story and on the character of Lilian. I met Snejanka around the second draft of the script, and as I continued writing subsequent drafts, I kept her presence in mind. At the writing stage, I work a bit like a sculptor. I conceptualise a prototype for a character, but I don’t yet know the final material. It could be clay, stone, wood, or gold. In that sense, Snejanka’s physical presence became the material we worked with, while still shaping the character of Lilian toward a very precise form. It became our north star, if you will – this prototype of a woman. A woman capable of understanding and embodying the conflict of being a psychologist in a prison, while at the same time having no idea how to connect with her own body and personal trauma. I proposed to Snejanka to start journaling as the character, so she could start building an emotional memory for Lilian. I believe this work helped us greatly on set and in defining Lilian’s emotional arc throughout the film.
The fantasies you build around our own narratives are important and useful – up to a point. Our responsibility as adults – or even as martyrs to our narratives – is to free ourselves from them once they no longer serve us.
CB: She enters very insecurely into the realm of her father, before she starts learning to read this world and gradually realises what she might want from it for herself. Maybe you can tell us something about the bodily aspect of your film. Very specifically. Why this apartment?
RP: I was interested in the idea of a contemporary intellectual who has moved beyond the need to prove herself – educated, brilliant, yet deeply introverted and only operating through the theory of things, having become disconnected from her body through family trauma. And you don’t know: Is it a wound inflicted by her mother, her father, society? It’s all entangled, and it’s no longer even important what exactly the trauma is. We see the damaging effects of it, where fantasy corrupts the real and lust kills love. So how do you break free?
CB: Yes.
RP: The fantasies we build around our own narratives are important and useful – up to a point. Our responsibility as adults – or even as martyrs to our narratives – is to free ourselves from them once they no longer serve us. That was my focus, and the disconnection from the body as a natural consequence of this. In this way, introducing Lilian through her addiction programme defines her entrapment. And you understand that she’s in a programme, where sobriety means ‘no sex of any kind.’ She’s vowed to celibacy. And we come to understand and identify with the character through this very austere restriction. I enjoy that the story starts at a point where the character wants to change, but her attempts fail her. She doesn’t know how. And this is what the story is about – the ‘how’ emerges unexpectedly. By facing everything that happens to her throughout the story, she’s finally able to connect with what she’s been searching for all along – her higher self, meaning, grace, her own version of God – something entirely inaccessible to her at the beginning of the film.
BW: Can you describe how you worked with her? I don’t even know which of all extraordinary scenes to choose from – they are brilliant, whether it’s the one with the snake, the bondage scene, or the spaces in general. From the filmmaker’s point of view – how do you work?
RP: Well, for me, writing, also means writing visually. And so I have these key scenes and key metaphors – these very haunting haiku images, which I then need to understand and sculpt into the film’s dramaturgy. One such image was the scene where Lilian is left suspended in bondage gear, evoking the way meat is displayed in a market. At the same time, Shibari – the Japanese art of rope bondage – is a very spiritual practice. I’m not a practitioner of BDSM, but I spent a great deal of time engaging with the community, out of respect and a desire not to exploit it. What I discovered was that many of these experiences can be profoundly transcendental and liberating. We worked with a professional instructor, Ludvig Rigger, because I wanted this specific posture that I found so beautiful. Snejanka worked closely with him in dedicated sessions, experiencing this reality first-hand before we shot the bondage scene. In this sense, all images are very written. Then with the cinematographer, Julian Atanassov, we check whether things feel honest. To me honesty is the key to the emotional integrity of a film. Is it truthful? Does it feel right? At no point do I fight to keep a concept over something that doesn’t feel right.
Every scene had to have this shift between jamais vu and déjà vu.
CB: Could you say something about the visual style?
RP: I love natural light. I love raw realism. To position something austere or something dangerous in a setting that appears safe, familiar, déjà vu. So I was interested in this clash of having a woman in a ‘safe’ middle-class living room, with an antique Persian carpet, wooden floor, a cosy velvet couch, a nice stereo. And then this long python passes through the living room. It’s so long you don’t see its head or tale, just the middle part sliding through the frame. Scary! I love these contrasts between the banal, the everyday, the familiar, and something otherworldly making the familiar unfamiliar. Turning the déjà vu into jamais vu. I love that.
BW: This seemed to become a concept.
RP: Yes, this was an entrance point. Every scene had to have this shift between jamais vu and déjà vu. The cinematographer and I worked like investigative journalists at first. Using the camera as a stalker, framing Lilian as if she’s hiding from us. There is one particular image in the beginning of the film that sets up this language. The camera observes Lilian’s reflection from behind as she eats a sandwich, revealing only part of her chewing jaw, her face deliberately obscured. Everything is very zoomed in, solitary, and lonely. Even her face is cut out of the frame, but the camera is still there, watching, like an intruder who refuses to leave the room. We wanted to have this omnipresence, nudging the character to face her reality. ‘Hello, I'm here.’ ‘You can't keep running away.’ But Lilian doesn’t want to face any of it. Literally. And as she very slowly becomes open to embracing the things she is running away from, the camera starts to be more of a friend, a guardian, and even the lighting is softer and a support for her.
CB: I want to get to the suspense, because for me, this was also something that triggered me a lot. I don’t expect it, and all of a sudden it’s there…
RP: I love suspense! So that’s the short of it. I love Hitchcock. My mantra is very much: Less is more. Where is the tension? Enter a scene as late as possible, exit the scene as early as possible, very much influenced by Haneke, and Michel Franco in that sense. They are both brilliant with tension. When Hitchcock talks about the MacGuffin – the bomb under the table or what’s in the suitcase – it doesn’t matter what it is. It pushes the story forward and gives you the drive to explore the deeper themes of the film and what the story is really about. For me, suspense was very important in this film, because this story exists in a genre context. It’s a mystery story. It’s an investigative story. The codes were deliberately chosen: the trench coat, the python. The dream and fantasy scenes are very much rooted in the real, creating this horror-like anxious feeling. The father is shown on a mobile phone, as if he’s in a 12-step-programme, confessing what Lilian would have liked to hear. But it’s clearly a dream – her mind compensating by creating the fantasy of a repentant alcoholic who has gained awareness – something she’s perhaps longed for. And the abandoned snake – it’s a pet, after all. I try to define the main contrasts within the story very early in the script’s development, because they create tension and give space for exploration during the shoot.
BW: Culturally, do you frame yourself as Bulgarian filmmaker? Is the film also about this connection between living and working abroad, and returning to Eastern Europe with a lot of experience?
RP: When I’m at Berlinale, I will have turned 50. I left Bulgaria when I was 18, so I’m very much a rolling stone – a person of the diaspora. I often say that abroad I feel freer, but in Bulgaria I feel deeper, because Bulgaria is where I was born and where my traumas are. With these films, I am returning to honour them. I would also love to make a film in the UK, because I know the UK; I know Japan, the States, and Europe – I’ve lived in these places, and they have shaped me in profound ways. All of this movement feeds directly into how and why I make films. I always try to remind myself of Rilke’s message: to create out of necessity – to create with honesty and vulnerability, and to go where you’re afraid to be. And that’s the short answer: I return to the ghosts that haunt me, wherever they are, and try to make friends with them.
BW: Perfect. That is a full stop. Thank you so much.
