Delirium, the much-awaited second narrative feature film by Ihor Podolchak is all but ready for its world premier. According to Mr. Podolchak, his new picture was offered for official competition at the Tribeca International Film Festival which is take place in April of 2012. The film lineup of that festival is to be announced in early March. The author of these lines was granted a rare opportunity to be among the first to see the film in Mr. Podolchak's own production studio in Lviv last August. The film examines the inner world of humans stuck in mundane circumstances that become a stark background for emotions that grow in intesity, progressively lose connection with a recognizable reality and quickly start bordering on the psychotic. This quitessentially art-house picture has no plotline in the traditional sense of the word. It does not need one to do what is seems to want to do - explore the dark areas of human psyche, the innermost motivations of our actions. Outward events depicted in the film are only pretexts for such an exploration and this is evidenced by the director's synopsis:

" ... an ordinary funeral procession moves along its path from church to cemetery.  Observing it, you slip from reality into a place where time has lost its linearity, looping through the odd images thrown off by a distorted reality. Images of things that do not exist, of varying reflections of death emanating from both past and future, concrete yet abstract, horrible yet desirable.
"A family asks a young psychiatrist to be their guest for a while to untangle the circumstances of their father’s illness. He develops a suicidal fixation on ropes and knots, among other things. While deeply involved in analyzing the patient’s delirium, the doctor begins to lose track of events around him. His initial mission to help is relegated to the background by the question that overtakes his thoughts “Who am I, doctor or patient? A chance guest, member of this suffering family, or a Catholic priest who dreamed this all up?” In order to get a handle on it all, it’s best to start from the beginning, but why do things keep shifting, changing…?"

What is clear is Podolchak's fascination with the camera and, in a wider sense, with the most cutting-edge filmmaking technologies he uses in Delirium. He actively, almost with abandon, manipulates space, time, shapes, colors, sounds, and even moods, taking the cinematic expression to new limits and revealing to the eye strangely beautiful frames, so far never experienced in Ukrainian cinema. In that sense, his new film is both innovative and self-referential, it is as much about the viewer exposed to a barrage of impressions that in turn provoke, puzzle, and unsettle, as it is about a new approach to the very filmmaking that is demonstrated but not yet fully verbalized.

Now that the film is, in Ihor Podolchak's words, "almost completed," its producers are strategizing for its world premier to take place at one of major, so far unknown, international film festivals. Once the film has run the usual festival circuit, the Ukrainian Film Club will screen it at one of its own events.

Yuri Shevchuk

DELIRIUM / CAST & CREDIT LIST

Written, directed, and edited by Ihor Podolchak

Based on the novel "Inductor" by Dmytro Beliansky

Producers: Ihor Diurych and Tamara Podolchak

Co-producer: Liliya Mlynarych

Director of photography: Mykola Yefymenko

Art director: Svitlana Makarenko

Music by: Oleksandr Schetynsky

Sound directing and sound design by: Myrоslav Kuvaldin

Cast:  Volodymyr Khimiak as Guest / Psychiatrist
Lesya Voinevych as Mother
Petro Rybka as Father / Professor
Olha Horbach as Daughter
Olha Bakus as Maid
Ivan Kostenko as Son / Son-in-law
Vasyl Kostenko as Priest

Script & project development was financed by Hubert Bals Fund / International Film Festival Rotterdam / The Netherlands.