Ekaterina Parshina

The very first spark of the idea was that there is an Orthodox icon in my parents' house. When you look at it at an angle, all you see is a dark silhouette of a man and a golden circle of a halo. And it always seemed to me that it looked very much like an astronaut, not a saint, not a traditional image. And even then I thought it was an interesting visual moment.

And then, when I was studying dramaturgy at the institute and came back to this idea again, I thought it would be interesting to break something super valuable. It would be dramatic to break a halo. That's how the visual idea was born.

I saw this image at a rather conscious age, around 17. Later I periodically returned to this idea, and the more I learned about animation, dramaturgy, directing, the clearer it became. Initially I wanted to make this cartoon in my third year, but unfortunately I had to develop the concept for a very long time. I wanted it to be done in some decent way dramaturgically. I don't know if it worked out or not, that's for you to judge. It came to a satisfactory form for me by the end of my fifth year, and I made it my thesis.

I graduated from SPUFT, and the faculty there was quite diverse — some were truly amazing, fascinating people, and some… I’ll leave uncommented. I’d say the idea was partly supported by my editing professor, Denis Vladimirovich Egorov, who later became my thesis advisor. I’m grateful that he and others gave me guidance, asked thought-provoking questions, and helped me reflect on the work — but never tried to take over. For me, my projects are deeply personal, so if someone’s opinion clashed too much with mine, I probably wouldn’t follow it. But I’m very thankful to the teachers who gently nudged me in the right direction.

No, not at all. I mean that I wouldn’t necessarily take a teacher’s feedback into the film if it clashed with my vision. I had a very clear idea of what I wanted. If the university had been fundamentally opposed to my approach, maybe I wouldn’t have done it as a graduation project. But I still would’ve made the film. You might not know this, but my producer and I raised the budget on a crowdfunding platform, and many of our friends, colleagues, and followers contributed. So it’s a pretty independent film — it was just convenient to make it part of my thesis since it solved a few logistical issues.

The hardest part was stopping the development phase and actually starting production. I was completely consumed by perfectionism — it was my first real solo project as a director and writer, and I was really unsure of myself. There were so many ideas that didn’t make it into the final version. At some point — with help from my advisor — I realized I just had to start, to allow the film to be finished, even if it wasn’t perfect or didn’t include every visual idea I’d imagined.

I actually want to leave room for interpretation. There are lots of mythological images woven in, and I think it’s beautiful when a film or cartoon can be mysterious — something you can interpret in different ways.

Well, it’s partly about what I wanted to give them, and partly about what the viewer sees. The main character is kind of a perfectionist-neurotic — a bit cowardly and passive most of his life, but with lofty ideals and big questions. He’s a bit of a couch philosopher who gets swept up into adventures rather than seeking them out. I’m really fond of all the characters, but I especially like the alien twin brothers. I see them as enlightened beings — more evolved, above all our earthly passions and desires. They’re very goal-driven, even if they repeat certain actions cyclically. And then there’s the alien girl — I think she’s clever and whole, with a dark side. She’s a bit of a foil to the main character.

Every creator reflects themselves in their work, so yes, probably. If we’re talking Jungian psychology, a person channels their unconscious into their art. I also think that all the traits I described show up in everyone, depending on what role we’re playing in different life situations.

The sound was designed by Timur Farniyev. When I met him — even before work on the film began — I felt that we were creatively in sync. He’s very curious and inquisitive, which you don’t always find in your immediate circle at film school. We looked for the sound palette together, discussed references, and experimented a little, but overall, the credit goes to him.

There was one particular sound that was very important to me — the call of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird, a now-extinct species. It was a male bird singing a mating call, but there were no females left, so no answer ever came. I found that incredibly poetic and sad — it’s not music or a song in the usual sense, but a kind of music of nature. I really wanted that sound in the film. The only surviving recording was very poor quality, and we tried many ways to recreate it with instruments or clean it with neural networks. In the end, Timur manually cleaned all the noise — the old-fashioned way. It was painstaking work, and I’m very grateful to him for that.

Yes, probably! One idea I can share is that I’m working with a screenwriter friend on a children’s animated series. That’s also a fascinating genre.

Hmm… I’d say: listen only to yourself, and talk less, do more.