PLUCK

Director Statement

Intertwining fiction and nonfiction, ‘The Mirror that Fell to Earth' transports the Hungarian Busójárás Festival into a fictionalized end of the world. A time to act outside of moral standards, the week-long fertility festival is a time where women are chased down and humped by men in furry costumes for good fortune, it's also part of a ceremony to scare away father winter and part legend of the Ottoman War. This setting is replaced with a fictionalized unknown disaster, the incessant buzzing suggesting technologies take over, which leaves the field and women barren, the masked men born out of panic. Believing that by studying one culture one can shed light on humanity as a whole, the film celebrates the viral spirit of the Busójárás festival, a liberal time to act outside of moral codes. It intertwines modes of surrealism, ethnography films, and narrative cinema to open a wider discourse that will investigate and question human nature and constructed social norms and taboos, such as the relationship of subjectivity and reality, the seeking for transcendence as an innate universal trait, and the ideas of normality surrounding sexuality.

I hope to guide viewers through a visceral cathartic journey, pushing their limitations, entering their subconscious to entice a truer, primal self within, shooting the project on my own to delve myself into the experience, hoping to create an equally vivid experience for viewers. I chose to tell a dystopian tale, to suggest when faced with the end, in desperation, we would return to our primal selves, and this ultimately may be our salvation. The incessant unexplained buzzing represents the means of our downfall - technology taking over, bees dying out, or something from the sky, possibly aliens that is the cause of the world’s downfall – the furry men are then a result of mass panic. The film is inspired by The Wicker Man (1973) and dystopian tales such as A Clockwork Orange and 1984 and this idea of technology pushed too far will eventually be our downfall.