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Numbness is a story about freezing in the face of violence and the impossibility of intervention, unless you change your appearance. Vik is a furry. He feels a deep connection with animals and uses his fursuit to free his zoomorphic self. The costume challenges Vik to get involved in situations he wouldn’t dare to face otherwise. As a furry, he follows his instinct to fight the established order of his surroundings, as well as his own fears. One of the main narrative lines of the film concerns the liberation of a woman from the grip of an abuser who paralyses his victims through psychological terror. On a deeper level, the driving force of the narrative is a sense of indefinable fear — a fear of everything and everyone. Vik’s fursuit acts as a superhero cape, but the results of his attempt to save everyone seem absurd and oneiric. Snow and obscurity in my film build an image of a necrorealist Moscow, in whose streets we find the protagonist prowling in his wolf-dog suit. He is a modern were-wolf, driven by fear. In addition to examining the topic of fear, the film attempts to highlight the problem of abuse — domestic violence in particular. The scene in the car is based on an autobiographical episode. In my case the incident ended when I arrived at the metro; I didn’t have to meet the abuser and his victim again. Nevertheless, it was a threatening experience of total loss of control over the situation, an experience that instigated a state of deep psychological numbness. It’s hard to even imagine how people live with this terror for years. My aim was to draw attention to the problem of abuse and the traumas that it causes, introducing surreal elements into an all-too-real story to allow it to be examined from an unusual angle.
Country: Russian Federation
Webpage: https://vimeo.com/gerbarashek
Petr Tarasov was born in 1987 in Moscow. In 2009 graduated from Moscow State University of Economics, Statistics and Informatics. In 2010 graduated from Courses of Animation in British High School of Design (Vadim Medzhibovsky Lab). After graduation Petr worked as director and animator of animated feature films, shows and advertising. In 2016 graduated from Dmitry Mamuliya Laboratory of Directing in Moscow School of New Cinema.
