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COTTBUS 2016

Incarnation: An existentialist thriller in the form of a spectacular video game

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- Serbian director Filip Kovacevic revisits the questions of ‘who am I?/where do I come from?/where am I going?' through a character lost in a story that always takes him back to the beginning

Incarnation: An existentialist thriller in the form of a spectacular video game

Serbian director, screenwriter and producer Filip Kovacevic, who trained as a mathematician and was one of the hosts of the 26th Cottbus Festival of East European Cinema, confided in Cineuropa that his debut feature film Incarnation [+see also:
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, which was chosen for the Spektrum section is above all the story of a lost man, a piece with existential tones which serves here not only as a premise, but as a key narrative detail throughout this thriller. 

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Indeed, the main character (Stojan Djordjevic), whose name we don’t know as even he has forgotten it, as he notes when he wakes up, right at the beginning of the film, on a bench in the middle of a busy square in the historical centre of Belgrade, spends the entire film in a never-ending cycle of starting over in exactly the same way, or nearly. Without a clue of who he is, what he must do or who the men in white masks are who kill him over and over again, bringing him back to the beginning to wake up on the same bench, he tries everything he can to break the cycle and understand what’s happening to him.

With added paranoia, our hero finds himself in exactly the same situation as a character from a video game, and this parallel becomes clearer and clearer as the film goes on, supported by the movement of the camera and carefully chosen angles, the throbbing repetition of an action film music, frightening and heavy with suspense and built to a crescendo by brass, the action topography (from the square the character always ends up coming back to, to the many corridors and tunnels he runs through in the strange places he finds himself in, via a vast desert of fantasy), the objects/clues that our hero collects as he goes along, the indifferent faces, starting with the masks of the bad guys. 

Not only does Kovacevic brilliantly imitate this fictional world (although the young director incorporates the video game world as more of an influence than a direct reference), he also adopts many of its limitations (namely inter-determination), in a way that invites the audience to reflect on the very notion of a plot. His hero, whose eyes he almost never removes his gaze from, and whose choices affect the way everything moves around him (or rather who brings everything to a grinding halt, as if waiting, when he stops), is like a character in search of an author who doesn’t realise that what he desperately seeks is already inside him.

At this flicker of an answer to his questions, his total anonymity stops being an absence of information and starts to take on special meaning, as he likens his feeling of confusion to that of everyone (or better said: anyone) when contemplating life and destiny, as hopeless as an incomplete piece of fiction, the meaning of which doesn’t surface until right at the end, when you’ve left it behind for good.

The film is produced by VOID Pictures and co-produced by Viktorija Film.

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(Translated from French)

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