Irish director Juanita Wilson’s Live-Action Short nominee “The Door” is a chilling, beautiful film that begins with a voiceover: “That day we didn’t just lose a town,” says a male voice, in Russian. “We lost our whole world.”
The setting is a town outside Chernobyl, though we don’t know that until later in the film. “The Door” is the heartbreaking story of how the 1986 nuclear disaster impacted the lives of those nearby, but politics are never mentioned; this is a very personal, emotional and terribly sad story, told with economy and grace.
The film is Wilson’s first as a director, though she’s now in post-production on a feature set in Bosnia during the war. The day after Monday’s nominees luncheon, Wilson spoke to theWrap at her hotel, where she’d rendezvoused with the Irish filmmakers responsible for the nominated feature “The Secret of Kells” and the animated short “Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty.”
You’re an Irish filmmaker, with a Spanish name, making a movie in Russian. It’s confusing.
I know. Even when we were making it, nobody was sure if it was an Irish film or not. We weren’t even sure the Irish Film Board would be able to support a film that was made outside of Ireland, but they did.
What drew you to the story?
There’s a book by a Ukranian journalist, Svetlana Alexievich, called “Voices of Chernobyl,” which is incredibly moving. She spoke to a lot of people who’d been involved in Chernobyl, and compiled this book of them speaking in their own words.
This particular story is very short, about a page and a half, but the man talks about stealing his own front door, and driving it on the back of a motorbike through a forest. And that image just stayed in my head. It seemed to be a really interesting way to structure something, where you would start not knowing what was going on or if this guy was crazy, and you’d only reveal the purpose at the end of it.
You shot part of the film fairly near Chernobyl, didn’t you?
Yeah. We went to Minsk first to cast the actors, and we were going to shoot it there. But when we got back to Ireland I found a photo of Pripyat, the city where we shot the opening. And the empty ferris wheel, the abandoned playground, seemed such a strong symbol of what the film was about, the loss of childhood, that we thought, we have to go there. And then I saw a photo of it in the snow, and I thought, okay, we have to go there in the winter. So we put our plans back for six months, and waited for the snow.
How’s your Russian?
Unfortunately, abysmal. I’d love to have been able to communicate better. I had to have an interpreter all the time, which was a big problem when the interpreter would go home for the day and I’d want to talk to the actors over dinner.
