Derevyannaya komnata

The protagonist of The Wooden Room is a director of documentaries, who lives with his wife – who is as stoic as he – in an isolated hut in the woods. The director is obsessed by filming marginal events in life. The closer he can get to these events with his camera, the more he becomes involved with them. In the end he falls victim to them. The film, with no dialogue and hardly any sound, is an experimental meditation on the complex, continually-changing relationship between a film-maker and his subject. Yevgeni Yufit: ‘There are lots of works of art dedicated to ecology and protecting nature – the natural surroundings of mankind. But the ecology of the human psyche influenced by present-day conditions is a subject that is usually ignored by art – and by film in particular. The Wooden Room studies, in its own way, the negative influence of civilisation on the consciousness of man.’