White Snail, the new movie from directors Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter (Space Dogs), took 10 years to conceive and shoot. Snail’s pace, so to speak!

After its world premiere in competition at the Locarno Film Festival earlier this month, though, White Snail was soon considered a dark horse. And it ended up winning a special jury prize at the venerable Swiss festival. Plus, stars Marya “Masha” Imbro and Mikhail “Misha” Senkov, who appear in the film as Masha and Misha, were honored with best performance awards.

The filmmakers and their stars have been busy as bees, following up Locarno with a spot in the fiction feature competition of the 31st edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival, which runs through Aug. 22.

The romantic drama tells the story of a Belarusian model dreaming of a career in China who finds herself drawn to a mysterious loner who works the night shift at a morgue. “Their encounter unsettles her sense of body, beauty, and mortality,” says a synopsis, which promises ”the fragile love story of two outsiders who turn each other’s worlds upside down and discover that they are not alone.”

The story told in the movie was developed based on the lives and experiences of the two stars. But it had no script and was largely improvised.

Intramovies is handling international sales on the Austrian-German co-production from producers
Lixi Frank and David Bohun of Panama Film, and Kremser and Peter of RaumZeitFilm.

At Sarajevo, Kremser and Peter talked to THR about what went into making White Snail, representing depression and suicidal thoughts on screen, and the importance of images and metaphors in the film.

You two have mentioned that you actually worked in a morgue for a few days to prepare for the film. Can you share some insight into how this came about?

Peter Misha brought us to several morgues in Minsk. This was the starting encounter. We were amazed by how actual dead people look. It’s very different from the image that we see in mainstream cinema. And then we understood that we needed to spend time in the morgue for practical reasons – to understand the movements there, the working methods, etc.

It was a long negotiation until we were allowed in like medical students. We arrived with our DOP, and the person who worked in the morgue said, “No, you’re not going to watch me. That’s annoying. You’re going to work with me.”

Kremser “There is so much to do here. Please give me a helping hand.” It was not easy. And it was different for each of us. I think for the DOP, it was mainly to understand all the movements and how this work is physically, because it’s a very tough job. I mean, the human bodies are heavy. Misha, in his real life, is really suffering from 20 years of working there, in terms of back pain.

Of course, there was COVID when we were there. So there were many, many people in the morgue. There was no vaccination, so for us, it was a crucial point to do this. We worked there for three weeks on a daily basis before we started to shoot, also to understand Misha’s kind of natural habitat.

Peter There’s an obscure but still very touching love scene when they both put makeup on this elderly lady who died. These things we also did to understand how delicate this all is, how much you struggle to touch, how much you think about profound things to honor these people.

The characters Misha and Masha in the film discuss suicide attempts and thoughts. As filmmakers, how did you approach such a sensitive subject?

Kremser For us, it was very important to really get close to Masha’s real feelings to understand where this depression and suicidal thoughts can come from. And so we were researching with many young people, not only in Belarus, talking to them to find out what the reason for this is. And there are multiple reasons for depression and for being lonely, and we tried not to make it cliché, but to understand what you actually see from depression.

It’s not an easy thing, because people usually hide when they are depressed, and we talked to a lot of people who had been in touch with people who had [died by] suicide. The hardest thing is that you don’t see it, and we wanted to show something you don’t see. Because as soon as you make it simple, cinematic, and put up an image, it could be very wrong, or it could even motivate people in the wrong way.

Peter I think the most challenging and harmful question for youngsters with suicidal thoughts is the question why. There can never be an answer. That is why it was so important that our other main character, Misha, is never asking why. And it was important for us that, in the movie, he is shown as someone who already knows and who does not need to ask. And this is, for us, the most profound way of understanding each other.

Tell me about this scene with a tree. Misha says people believe that if they take their clothes off, leave a piece on the tree, and crawl through a hole in the trunk, it can help them. That felt a bit like shamanism. Does this tree really exist?

Kremser In our time in Belarus, we witnessed so many young people who actually believe in all these mythological methods. We were looking for a seer, one of these old women in villages who read from the water or whisper or make all these kinds of rituals. In one of the first drafts of the script, it was always such a woman that they went to visit together. Then we were casting for such a woman, we found several really traditional, old, Belarusian-speaking women in faraway villages. But we felt it was a depiction of a cliché from Eastern Europe, a post-Soviet cliché, and we didn’t want to romanticize this region. But one of these ladies was actually showing us the tree and said, “They come here from Minsk all the time with chic cars, and then they go and undress and go through this tree.” Of course, we were amazed and thought, now we have a tool which we want to use in the film, a real tree.

Peter Most of the clothes are real. They hang there for years. And the tree was central, because we didn’t want to romanticize. We also believe that in the post-Soviet countries, nostalgia has been misused in the last decade in a political way. And we really don’t agree with this nostalgia. When I first started to encounter art nostalgia, for me, it was about aesthetics, and I think politics took over. In a lot of countries, they try to make us believe that there’s so little hope in the future that they want us to believe that everything was better in the past, and that’s why we try to play with this to show that there is a mythology. It’s very important for us as a metaphor.

You have mentioned metaphors and images. Misha paints images and has them on his body in the form of tattoos. In contrast, Masha is pale white. I had the feeling that you were playing with that, too, right?

Kremser Of course. She’s even as a projection as a model. And she has that white appearance. We can project everything onto a white wall, let’s say, and in the modeling school, you have to be that clean. And then the phone screen is again making things cleaner than they may actually be. These two surfaces, the screen and the canvas that he paints on, were interesting for us. We wanted to bring them together somehow.

Peter Also, when I think about classic coming of age, the sun and the summer always bring light and hope. In Masha’s case, and this is tragic to us too, it’s the opposite. Sun is very harmful to her, to her skin, so she needs to hide under an umbrella. But the night is embracing her. It suits her much, much better, because she can shine. So, that was bringing so much to the film that we could work with visually.

Do you have an idea or plan for your next project?

Kremser There are several things in our minds. We really love shooting, so we are aiming to shoot, and not after a very long time, but we are still in the research phase, so we will see which of the ideas will stick with us.

Peter We definitely want to go on with fiction in our way, fictionalized, I would say. This is something we want to evolve even more. We just hope it doesn’t take too long.