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SOLDIERS’ DREAMS.RAPTURE

Experimental short film


 

 

 

LOGLINE

 

Independently, many therapists working with World War II soldiers have discovered patterns of soldiers ' dreams. All of them dreamed of aliens who kidnapped men, moved into their bodies and came to earth to terrorize the population and make various evil and nasty things. What do these dreams mean? Why do different people have such similar dreams? How does this relate to PTSD and the existence of aliens?



 

SYNOPSIS

 

Soldier's dreams.Rapture -  is a seven-episode experimental film (each episode is around 5-10 minutes)  created with the help of artificial intelligence, telling the dreams of soldiers who fought in World War II. As stated in the Logline, therapists who worked independently with soldiers after World War II suddenly discovered that all soldiers had recurring dreams of being abducted by aliens (regardless of which country they fought for)

This is an artificially invented story by the artist Igor Tsvetkov and first realized by him in a series of ultrashort animation artworks - “Rapture” (first shown at a large multidisciplinary exhibition of the artist's solo exhibition in Berlin at the Kuchling Gallery in 2023). And then in the short samename experimental film, directed together with theater director Maxim Didenko in 2023.The film  “Soldier’s dream. Rapture”  will be based on seven patients (former soldiers) telling their therapists about their dreams. Each of the film's seven episodes will feature one character. Their dialogue will be a voiceover to the video sequence created by Igor Tsvetkov with the help of AI.


















 

ARTISTIC APPROACH AND CONCEPTUAL IDEAS

 

The artistic approach to the implementation of the project can be divided into several parts, each will be not only a technical tool, but also a way of expressing a specific conceptual idea.


 

AI

The use of AI as the main image generator for the project was chosen based on the fact that at the current stage of AI development, the images it creates look most visually similar to the visualization of dreams. Artificial intelligence, like a sleeping consciousness cut off from the rest of the world, completes the picture by creating it with its imagination. The principle of working with AI in the project can be described in this way: the artist will upload his own works as the main references and then refine them together with AI and without. Customize to the voiceover and create animation patterns (examples of such work can be found at the links at the very bottom of the presentation)


 

Voiceover

Writing a voiceover text, the story of the soldier's dream to the therapist (and the viewer) and the therapist's dialogue with the patient, is the most informative and basic statement of the film. In order to create a more honest picture and a stronger artistic and political (primarily anti-war) statement, the author plans to involve people with real combat experience, participants in wars, former soldiers, volunteers, etc. in writing these monologues. The author plans to involve representatives of national minorities or small (compared to empires) nationalities and countries. 

For example, from representatives of the Soviet Union to choose a person of Georgian origin, and as a soldier from the United States, a Native American.

With this approach, the author hopes not only to highlight the participation of many peoples in global history, contrary to the prevailing narrative of the victory of the Russians, Americans, French, etc., but also hopes to reveal the colonial and imperialist side of the issue. For example, many nations of Eastern Europe were divided by opposing empires on different sides of the front, contrary to their wishes. In addition, the voice of small ethnic groups and nationalities in the discourse of psychological post-war therapy will cause an ironic view about the industry of such therapy, which only rich selected European countries and privileged people can afford. 

Through the aesthetics of conversations with therapists in different languages and in different cultural codes, the author hopes to show the differences between humane therapy for the sake of healing the patient and scientific militaristic research experiments of large totalitarian empires and colonial countries.

 

Characters

All the soldiers - heroes of the episodes (perhaps with rare exceptions) will be men, so the author not only wants to give a more truthful picture from the point of view of creating a pseudo-document (it is known that in the middle of the 20th century the role of men in military conflicts was fully monopolized in public opinion) but also to create a pattern of criticism of the patriarchal nature of war and violence. Therapists, on the contrary, will be mostly women, thus creating, among other things, an intra-family inter-gender conversation: wife-husband, mother-son. etc. The idea of ​​a clear gender division of characters may be criticized by the author or producer and may be partially changed in accordance with more pressing issues of our time. In this connection, the author plans to involve a female co-author to write the psychotherapist’s remarks

 

In general, the author sets himself the task, with the help of fairly simple artistic techniques of surreal cinema and art language, to reveal the current topics of equality, violence, increasing hatred and revanchism. Make clear anti-war, anti-militarist, anti-colonial statements. To highlight the “little man” in the role of history, to show his/her impotence in the face of big political figures and forces. Through the messages of dreams, to show the spiritual experiences of participants in tragic events, to give a voice to their inner self. Which, despite the fact that the soldiers are on different sides of the front, indicates the existence of some kind of common enemy in the form of aliens, an enemy manipulating people's minds for their own needs. In addition to revealing the universal social aspects, the author plans to focus the viewer's attention on the personal responsibility of each of us, even the smallest participant, for what is happening around us, criticizing a person's attempt to avoid the truth about himself by hiding behind hallucinations created by his own mind.


 

 





 

DIRECTOR STATEMENT

 

My own story, as the story of my family, is closely connected with the Second World War and its consequences. My father is a victim of Stalinist political repression, a Latvian by nationality - the son of a Latvian mother and an “enemy of the people” (her father was shot because of his ethnicity and the whole family was exiled to central Russia) and a Russian father who was captured by the Germans in 1941 and died in a prisoner of war camp in the same year. My maternal relatives, like my mother, are Ukrainians. My grandfather, a Ukrainian who fought in the USSR Armed Forces, escaped from German captivity in 1941 and ended up in a penal battalion (in the Soviet Union there was a law according to which soldiers captured by the enemy had to atone for their guilt with blood, that is, they had to be killed or wounded as part of a penal battalion). Despite this, he reached Berlin and lived a long life in Ukraine. My ethnic identity is Latvian\Ukrainian\Russian. The three nations that have had and still have huge disagreements over a long history get along quite peacefully inside me. 

The current event is another aggression by modern Russia against Ukraine, another round of history, in which ordinary people become cannon fodder on all sides of the conflict, and big politicians meet at summits and shake hands. As a person familiar with the protocols of Soviet interrogations of my relatives, as well as understanding the circularity of historical processes and the personal (often purely material) motivation of people making decisions to kill, destroy, rape, I clearly understand the structures of evil formation, both as political and as psychological phenomena. This is a rather complex structure, which I intend to show in the most difficult to speak but the easiest to understand language - language of art.






 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

Igor Tsvetkov is an artist and filmmaker. As an animator he has a unique style and his works are in many digital collections. Most famous collector of his art is French director Quentin Dupieux (Mr.Oizo), who considers him as one of his favorite digital artists. As a filmmaker Igor is an award winning producer, cinematographer and editor. With theater director Maxim Didenko he continues to work on their own pseudo-noir post-apocalyptic  universe "Dark Times", completing the film "Rapture" (director, producer, editor) which was shown in his solo exhibition in Berlin in February 2023, as a pre-premiere screening.







 

LINKS

whole film by the request (for free) or by this link - https://igortsvetkovfilms.vhx.tv/products/rapture-2023 

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