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The Hallucinations

Princess Elizaveta never questioned her wish for queendom. Then she started hallucinating the future.

synopsis

The time is century XVIII. Born and raised to be a future queen, princess Elizaveta has never questioned her wish for queendom. She always made a secret of a strange tinnitus in her ear, that manifested through otherworldly sounds and voices she couldn’t explain if not by thinking of the supernatural. Soon it was time to leave her birthplace and marry the heir of a neighbouring country to create a most powerful alliance. But the hallucinations follow her, and horrible sounds of riots and explosions ruin what should have been the best day of her life. Unwilling to fulfill the bedding ceremony, her failure to get pregnant upsets the king: when she falls unconscious from a horse, he orders the prince to impregnate her by rape. This is when the sounds turn into visions, and she understands she doesn’t only see the future, but that it hides a tragic destiny for her, and a dreadful massacre of the starving population by the avid family. Conscious of being trapped by a power drowning in hubris, she plots a plan to abort the child and reveal the truth to a future seeker through a diary. She now understands that justice will eventually prevail, and the truth will set her free – but only after it has finished with her.

Director’statement

I have always been very scared of the future: it comes from the sensation that we, as a capitalistic society, have long gone past the acme of our hubris, and that our alleged omnipotence could soon meet its doom. Visiting the Yusupov palace in Saint Petersburg some time ago, I thought about how the commodification of the place was the perfect example of downfall of a power that, in its own time, thought to be immortal like we do, and I imagined a story that would connect that time to ours, like a metonymy of our times. I felt it had to be channeled through a character that could also work as a metaphoric funnel for our own mechanisms of disparity, patriarchy and cultural obstinacy, and through a narrative device that could allow me to connect baroque maximalism with our century’s digital aesthetics. This character had to believe in something deeper than the illusions of her time: in the truth that eventually shines on every era, finally separating evil from good, mere hallucinations from the precognition of a world that could be better, if only it knew the meaning of “enough”.

TFL PROGRAMME:
ScriptLab 2024

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