02/07/2024 - The director discusses her exploration of grief and memory, the blending of autofiction and documentary essay, and the interdisciplinary influences on her feature debut

(© Film Servis Karlovy Vary)

Slovak-born, Berlin-based filmmaker and visual artist Paula Ďurinová is known for her interest in creating utopian landscapes and exploring forms of resistance. Her short films have been showcased at international festivals of the likes of Sarajevo, the Ji.hlava IDFF, One World Prague and CinéDOC Tbilisi. Ďurinová has also served as the artistic director and curator of the ACUD Galerie in Berlin. Cineuropa talked to the director about Lapilli [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Paula Ďurinová
film profile], screened in the Proxima competition at the Karlovy Vary IFF, which is a personal exploration of grief and memory through geological formations.

Cineuropa: Lapilli is a deeply personal film that explores grief and memory through the lens of geological formations. Can you share more about the initial inspiration for this project and how the sudden loss of your grandparents shaped the narrative?
Paula Ďurinová: Lapilli was created as a very process-based work. It started intuitively. After my grandparents suddenly passed away, I was confronted with a new reality that I often suppressed. Shortly after they passed, I became obsessed with the story of the Aral Sea, once the world's largest inland body of water, which has almost disappeared in our lifetime. As I researched the stages of grief, I began to see connections in the story of the vanishing lake.

Images of rocks, stones and rocky valleys were appearing in my mind. I decided to follow my intuition and visit some rocky places. Perhaps subconsciously, I knew that this had something to do with my grief. The hard matter gave me a sense of frozen time, but was also a projection of something in its “final” stage.

Lapilli has the narrative aspect of a journey through a landscape from which the water has receded, and as we follow its former influence, we engage and come to terms with the hard matter that remains. But we also find new processes taking place on their own. The process of mourning and working on the film merged.

Lapilli blurs the lines between autofiction and documentary essay. How did you navigate these genres?
At first, I didn't ask myself much about why I needed to be with the rocks. As I progressed, I became curious about the philosophies and interpretations of the landscape – deserts, volcanoes, caves and so on. This offered different ways of looking at it – let's say, interconnecting the geological and the mystical. There, I discovered my grandparents' story, and everything made more sense.

Writing the voice-over was challenging, as I struggled to express certain personal aspects more clearly. I was abstract, not giving the viewer a lot of clues. It was mainly with the help of script consultants Dane Komljen and Tamara Antonijević that I was able to step back from the very personal aspect and see what the film needed.

The movie has significant formalistic elements, with a focus on visual and auditory aesthetics. Can you discuss how you approached them?
I spent a lot of time researching the locations. The grieving process itself influenced the rhythm of the film and its dynamic, allowing me to capture restlessness, moments of pause or, for example, fear. The aspect of looking, of taking the time that's needed, was very important, not only in the camera work, but also in the editing.

I worked with old Carl Zeiss photographic lenses that capture the plasticity of the environment and the edges of the rock. We wanted the film to be sensorial. The interplay of Lapilli's visual, sound and editing aspects was very important. Together with Agnese Menguzzato, we created the soundscape of the film from scratch, composing sounds that represented not only memory transcribed in my body, but also our interpretation of the memory of the landscape. The music was composed especially for the film by musician Petra Hermanova. She has a collection of old, broken autoharps, and we worked specifically with them.

Your film draws on interdisciplinary research from geology, anthropology and philosophy. How did these disciplines influence the feature?
I could perhaps answer that with an example, although a similar approach runs through the film. At one point, while I was working on the movie, I found myself intensely drawn to the cave environment. I couldn't understand why I had to spend time there. I just had to go to the caves.

It was only after some research and discussions with anthropologist Peter Laučík, who studies the anthropology of the underground, that I understood it as a place of immersion in loss and trauma, but also as a safe space from which to approach depressive emotions and prepare for life after this. I wanted to convey this incubational aspect of the cave in my film. It’s a place where space and time have a completely different meaning. We are not able to observe a change in the shape of a stalactite, but it is happening nonetheless. In the total darkness of this environment, where there is no way to escape to another reality, any question can be asked.