Iza Strehar, the co-founder (in 2023) and now co-head, alongside director Žiga Virc, of Slovenian company Lilit, has produced several works by the director, including Stealing Land, the documentary Melting Dreams and the doc series Heroines. She is attending the 48th Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival, where she is pitching Purgatory at the Cinemed Meetings Development Grant. This is the new project by Virc (who first came to prominence with Houston, We Have a Problem!, his country’s submission for the 2017 Oscars), for which she is also the screenwriter.

Cineuropa: What is Purgatory about?
Iza Strehar: It is a story about a family that begins to fall apart after the father’s death, as his children fight over their inheritance in an isolated hunting lodge. I think most people have witnessed relationships going off the rails at a time like this. But this is also a project that will appeal to body-horror fans. The original idea came from Žiga (who is also my romantic partner) because after his father died, everything started to deteriorate within his family when the question of inheritance arose. As a screenwriter, I have always been interested in complex family dynamics, what they bring to the surface, what the story tells us on the surface and what lies beneath. Initially, it was a conventional, realistic family drama, but because Žiga was having nightmares in which he wanted to take his own life, as we discussed the project, which was already taking shape as a horror film, we decided to push things further and really explore the genre by finding ways to translate those nightmares onto the screen. Our references include the movies of Yorgos Lanthimos, Border by Ali Abbasi and Lamb by Valdimar Jóhannsson.

How far do you want to take the characters’ transformation into animals, as suggested by the screenplay?
Not all the way, obviously. Because whenever you see that in a film, it doesn’t work. We are currently exploring the possibilities offered by the characters’ behaviour, then we will see to what extent the actors can inhabit these characters and how we can play with their features through make-up, costumes, lighting and music. We will probably end up using special effects, but first, we want to assess how far we can go by relying solely on the actors and the resources at our disposal.

What stage is the project at?
We are still in development, but we are also trying to move forward with the financing at the same time. Ideally, we hope to shoot in September 2027, although I think March 2028 is more realistic. We already have a second draft of the screenplay, and the next version will be written in collaboration with the director of photography and a production designer, so that both departments can contribute to the writing process, with ideas going back and forth as in a genuine “creative room”. For now, we are considering shooting in Carinthia, and Austrian company Zwinger Film (Rok Biček) has already come on board as a co-producer, as has Greek company Asphalt (Minos Nikolakakis). But we have not made a final decision yet, and are also scouting locations in Slovenia and Italy. There is also a French character in the film, the wife of one of the sons, because the deceased man’s family works in the meat industry and exports animals, and because Slovenia, which has a large bear population, supplied several bears to France between 1996 and 2018 as part of a programme to reintroduce the species into the Pyrenees, which was not without its problems. If we find a French partner, we could incorporate this story into the film as well.

Is making an arthouse movie with genre elements a viable way of gaining easier access to the market today?
Žiga has always played with genres, from docufiction to comedy, and from comedy-drama to horror, so he is completely at ease with this project. But we also have the impression that festivals, in a bid to broaden their audiences, are looking for genre flicks, particularly horror films: the genre is very much in vogue.

What other projects is your firm, Lilit, currently working on?
The series Aristocracy (see the article), which is also a psychological horror story about a family hiding secrets, is in the final stages of post-production, and we hope to have the opportunity to premiere it at the next Séries Mania festival.