TOTEM

My interest in TOTEM was to continue portraying everyday life from a very intimate point of view, looking inside things. I like microcosms, the essence of things, matryoshkas, pyramids, things that contain other things. Since the central theme was the concept of home, staying in one place was my immediate, common sense response to the simple premise of the film. It's not that I want to be a “single location director”, it just happened. TOTEM is a story about family and friends. Therefore, I also knew that I had to put emphasis on the characters and the way they communicate. I love slang. Even when it is just talk, there is something there that already contains its own charge of linguistic transformation, the awareness that words matter, words that become microuniverses within the language itself. Most families have ways of communicating that are almost like a new language. You don't talk to your father the same way you talk to your mother or your dog. This diversity fascinates me, although it is very difficult to convey, but the energy of words never loses interest. a lot. Whenever we lose an animal species or a language, we lose a part of the larger puzzle and abandon a way of thinking. The genome of a species is a kind of manual. When the species dies, the manual is lost, whether it is an ant or a rhinoceros. We forget that we are animals. Today the extinction occurs. so many times that it seemed like we had gotten used to it. Life and death are a duality, as are wisdom and ignorance, within and without. outside, day and night, sun and moon, light and darkness, yin and yang.”