MALMKROG

a film by Cristi Puiu

Director’s Statement

The problems posed by adapting a real event for the screen are to a large extent contiguous with those that arise in the case of creating a film version of a literary text. The risk of manipulating events or distorting the author’s intention in order to put forward your own ideas, seems almost insurmountable. Perhaps this is why this screen version of Vladimir Solovyov’s Three Conversations seems to be a doubly onerous task. On one hand, it must recreate an epoch, with its language, traditions and customs, and, on the other, it must respect the spirit of Three Conversations and thereby its author’s intentions.

At the same time, in regard to the cinema properly speaking, the text constrains me to reformulate a large part of everything that has to do with image, acting and setting within a story told in the past tense. Therefore I decided to conceive the film as an interrogation on cinema and memory, allowing myself to imagine it step by step everyday, taking into account each vibration of the space, every change of the daylight, every fluctuation of the weather, every spasm of my intuition. These are the limits within which I plan to install my personal interpretation of a text that I consider to be, in many ways, prophetic.