IGOR IVANOV - IZI, the author of the short feature film "BUGS"

A Convincing Metaphor

The main character in your film is a young boy who is remembering his childhood. He is artistically closed within his own world, and the reality is there, somewhere around him and only occasionally he reaches it for a moment. What were your directorial instructions to the boy playing this role and dominating the film?

The subject is not autism, it is just an phenomenon. That is what the character has as the main staring point. The film is happening in two parallel times; one is, taken conditionally, the present, and the other, so to say, the past. That “conditional past” makes 90 percent of the film and it is a reminiscence of the childhood of the main character. The most difficult problem for me as the director was to find the actor. I organized the "Casting” for the seven-years old boys. I was looking for the “real” child, the child that visually looks autistic , who does not speak, and who is closed within his interior world with the condition that the camera could register all that. I remembered to look for such a child in the homes for abandoned children and that is how I found my hero. The boy is really autistic, which in his case is the consequence of mistreatment, of his being taken away from his parents. This was followed by difficult legal procedure of obtaining the permission to work with such a child. We made the film and I believe that we managed, in some medical and psychiatric sense, to help the little Djordjije Krstevski to get out of his closed circle, to make some step forward, at least a bit.

Has it ever occurred to you that, making such a film, in a metaphoric way you also present the state in Ex-YU part, as we all live in a somehow autistic way.

Most probably it is like that but my approach to this film is symbolic, only the symbols are not so direct and imposing. The spectators can find and connect them each in his or her own way. It seems to me that people have to be killed, to die or kill someone, to pull down something to change the things. It s one of the symbolic hints that I believe this story of mine contains. It is true, we all live in our own autistic worlds, and the bugs are a metaphor of our reality, and the little one, who is autistic, has his world. That is the world of his bugs, that he arranges according to his own classification, keeps them in different boxes, plays with them, feeds them. He is, in fact, the God in his world. When that world of his own is pulled down and destroyed, he revenges. That is the moment when the illusion is collapses and we return to the reality.

Will you disclose something about your long feature film …

The producer is "Sektor film", the same company as for the "Bugs", but we have partners from abroad, from Belgium and Croatia . The screenplay is based on another Macedonian work, a very popular novel “he navel of the World", by Venko Andenovski, the winner of the award "Balkanika".

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