Mariia Zhelondievskaia * filmmaker

process / methodology

The project began with a digitized family archive. Close observation of the photographs revealed recurring compositions, particularly group portraits in forests, gradually transforming seemingly ordinary family scenes into ambiguous and unsettling images.

This led to a broader investigation of the relationship between landscape, memory, and historical violence. The film combines family photographs, amateur recordings, television archives, and found footage from open-access platforms, focusing on fragmented and unofficial forms of historical memory.

The structure developed through the interaction of different temporal layers — domestic archives, collective memory, and contemporary observation. Through fragmentation, repetition, interruption, and absence, the film approaches history indirectly, allowing the forest to emerge as both a physical landscape and a space where traces of the past remain embedded.

synopsis

Filmed in San Sebastián, this experimental film unfolds through fragmented observations of space — the ocean, mountains, streets, animals, passing figures, and moments of stillness. Constructed from static handheld shots, the film follows fleeting presences and subtle shifts that often resist immediate interpretation.

Without dialogue or narrative direction, the images move through ambiguity, disappearance, and duration, allowing the viewer to inhabit the position of the observer. Gradually, the film becomes a meditation on perception, attention, and the unstable relationship between presence and absence.

process / methodology

The film developed through long walks with a camera across different parts of San Sebastián. Rather than following a script or searching for specific events, the filming process relied on intuition and spontaneous attention. I recorded spaces, movements, animals, people, weather conditions, and small visual situations that produced a certain tension or feeling, often without fully understanding why at the moment of filming.

Although the shots often appear static, they are filmed handheld, preserving slight instability and the sense of a physical gaze behind the camera. The viewer is never fully guided toward a single meaning or subject; at times it is unclear what exactly the image is observing. Figures frequently leave the frame and never return, while empty spaces, changing light, and small movements gradually become central elements of the film.

process / methodology

Inspired by alchemical texts and Russian esoteric philosophy, particularly the writings of Yevgeny Golovin and the Yuzhinsky Circle, the film approaches alchemy as a metaphor for inner transformation — the merging of identities, archetypes, and states of being.

The film translates this process into a purely visual experience, using landscape, movement, texture, light, and rhythm. Remote mountains, forests, clouds, stone, and water become extensions of an inner landscape, while the faceless, wandering figures function as projections of the unconscious.

The work was developed primarily through location, image, and editing, allowing meaning to emerge through visual association rather than fixed narrative. I worked independently as director and cinematographer, collaborating mainly with performers and sound.

synopsis

Nomen — a Latin word meaning “name” or “designation.” A white, anonymous figure moves through a series of architectural and natural spaces, passing from a modernist structure into the forest and darkness. As the journey unfolds, the figure gradually transforms, becoming increasingly reminiscent of a human being.

process / methodology

This film was an early exploration of themes that would continue through my later work: nonverbal storytelling, transformation of identity, and landscape as a psychological and symbolic space. Entirely dialogue-free, it relies on visual rhythm, gesture, light, and spatial relationships to construct meaning. Although the narrative contains elements of the supernatural, the visual language remains grounded in recognizable reality. Forests, water, darkness, and reflections gradually transform familiar environments into something uncanny and unstable.

Unlike my later films, the central figure remains visibly human. The relationship between the character and his shadow was developed through movement, blocking, and editing, treating the shadow as a parallel presence that gradually overtakes reality.

synopsis

Set within the industrial landscapes of post-Soviet Moscow, the film explores Russian Cosmism through the ruins of Soviet modernization. Abandoned factories, power stations, and monumental structures become remnants of a future that never arrived. Moving through these spaces, figures search for traces of a lost utopia, where dreams of collective immortality and cosmic destiny persist among the ruins. The film moves between documentary observation and speculative imagery, portraying a world suspended between the promise of progress and its remains.