Back in October, during DOK Leipzig, Sasha Kulak’s online pitch for her feature doc A Hawk as Big as a Horse generated a long and spontaneous round of applause, despite being made from a moving car on the way to Tbilisi. BDE quizzes Kulak again on her audacious tale of the Russian bi-gender Lydia who wants to recreate the ‘Twin Peaks’ universe in her home near the woods on the outskirts of Moscow.
“This story, like my own, may not fit the mainstream, but I think the world deserves to see it,” says Sasha of her project A Hawk as Big as a Horse, which she is pretty sure will be ready for festival consideration in the first quarter of 2022. “With Lydia I became so fascinated with her desire to control reality that I became a part of it.”
Lydia is a 45-year-old Russian bi-gender person, but also a highly respected ornithologist who was fired from her role at the Moscow Agricultural University. Now she lives with her wife (a trainer of police horses) on a small farm outside of Moscow, a place where she is at liberty to make her fantasies come true. Chief among these is a desire to create her own version of ‘Twin Peaks,’ renamed ‘Twin Peaks in Shcherbinka.’ She has also saved money to complete an exact silicon replica of ‘Twin Peaks’ actress Lara Flynn Boyle, whose tragic destiny she wants to change in her version of the story.
Director Sasha considers the non-urban regions of Russia as “sad places to live” where depression is rife. But Lydia, who is both complex and mesmerising to watch on screen, bucks this trend.
“Lydia has devoted her entire life to making her fantasies come true,” Sasha said during the Leipzig event. “She’s creating a new reality where she can bend the rules to fit herself and her surroundings, starting with her own gender transformation to now reconstructing David Lynch’s universe in her own home.”
“She made such a strong impression on me that I instantly decided I will make a movie about this person. I asked her what she dreamed off and she said, without any doubt, to recreate ‘Twin Peaks.’ So I offered her a deal. I will help you remake the film version of the ‘Twin Peaks’ universe that you always dreamed of, and in exchange I’ll have my movie. The film process took up so much of time, and of myself, that I started questioning my intentions and why I was so involved in Lydia’s story. I realized that although we seem very different, Lydia and I share a similar streak, the desire to control our narrative and to create a fairy tale reality to escape to.”
The 75-minute France/Russia production is produced by Louis Beaudemont of Paris-based Les Steppes Productions with the support of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. Funding was sourced via the Sundance Institute and SCAM.
Kulak her herself plays the role of narrator within the film (replacing, she says, an inanimate doll who, in pure Lynchian fashion, performed that role before in the film). When the director was developing the project at Berlinale Talents Doc Station, her intrinsic importance within the film was pointed out to her, how there wasn’t an action or gesture performed by Lydia that was not in some way “provoked” by Kulak. “At that moment a door opened in my head which I didn’t see before,” she says of this realisation of her influence over Lydia’s future fantastical trajectory.
“I realized that, yeah, this is maybe the moment when I need to stand up also and show myself in the film,” Sasha says. “The story is told through my character, but it talks about Lydia, her life and her fairy tale dreams.”
