A slender, hat-wearing woman is shown walking across jagged rocks, carrying a sack on her back. She is the only human character in Russian maestro Victor Kossakovsky’s new feature Trillion (a world premiere in Envision earlier this week). It’s a barren, sea-front landscape, but she is barefoot.
“What I do in my life is that I am travelling around the world, searching for unique people, unique characters who could be interesting for the big screen,” Kossakovsky explains the highly unusual circumstances in which he met the woman who features in Trillion. Out of the blue, she sent him an email, saying how much she had admired Aquarela (2018), his film about water and ice. He didn’t know her and was about to delete the message but was intrigued by a line in which she said that nobody understood her. She lived in Hamburg. The next day, which was his birthday, he went by train from Berlin to meet her.
“From the second I met her, I thought what she does is extraordinary,” he says of the woman whose identity he still refuses to disclose. He compares her to 14th Century icon painters who created works of art anonymously.
The woman collects fish scales discarded from a fish factory in Hamburg, washes them and then returns them to the sea.
Others might dub her eccentric or even crazy but Kossakovsky sees her as a visionary. “This is a very important question actually,” the director says when asked about his subject’s lack of footwear. She does her work barefoot – because otherwise you would slip. “First, I was stupidly with shoes and I fell badly, very badly,” he adds.
In the film, the woman wears a long, billowing dress and has a hat pulled over her brow. The director talks of wanting to “avoid any sexuality in the film and also not to expose her face….she is very beautiful but our agreement with her was that I don’t film her beauty, I don’t expose her sexuality.”
Like most Kossakovsky movies, Trillion is shot in breath-taking fashion, with bravura steadicam and very few cuts. It’s in black and white. Every shot has pictorial grandeur. Nonetheless, after the premiere at the weekend, the director was asked how he could justify “making a film about fish scales when Russia is making a war with Ukraine.”
“It’s a good question and it’s the right question, but I could say this is why I am making it. We are having war because there is a lack of empathy. Hopefully, we will finish war with Ukraine one way or another, and the planet will find a way to stop the aggression. But it doesn’t mean the concept of war, or the concept of killing each other, will vanish. It will probably just move to another country. Probably, the next generation of Russians will not have a war because of guilt and what horrible things we did…but it doesn’t mean war will disappear.”
Kossakovsky’s thesis is that war occurs because humans have little empathy for anyone or anything around them.
“If we are killing a trillion fish a year, it’s something unbelievable. We pretend we don’t. We eat fish and we don’t even think it’s a bad thing. We kill a billion pigs a year,” the director reflects. “This is what happens today in Russia. People pretend there is no war – we pretend we don’t know about it. Aggression and blindness come together.”
He calls for people in Russia to avoid participation in any kind of government activity. “You have to stop immediately. You don’t need to be poets with guns or even to kill anyone in Kremlin, but you have at least to stop participating in any connection with the ugly government.”
Kossakovsky goes on to list the millions of fish, chicken, pigs and cows that humans slaughter on a daily basis. “We kill and pretend we don’t…this is our routine. It doesn’t matter what we kill. The act of killing is the act of killing.”
Trillion isn’t an obvious polemical film. Audiences who saw it on Sunday responded to the music, the beautiful but abstract imagery and the film’s beguiling rhythm. Some were baffled by the subject matter – the woman returning the fish scales to the sea. The political allegory is very oblique.
“Wow, you can get applause, Oscars or any other prize because you film tragedy. That’s why I decided first of all to look for the roots of the problem, not for the consequences…not for the war, but why there is war.”
Trillion is the second in the director’s “empathy trilogy.” The first film Gunda (2020) took us deep into the daily life of a pig. He didn’t show the slaughterhouses because that would have been too crude and journalistic. He wanted to show the pig’s personality, not to make another film about killing. Similarly, with Trillion, we don’t see factory fishing. The focus is on a single woman trying “to say sorry” in her own very idiosyncratic way by returning the scales to the sea.
The woman was in the audience at the IDFA premiere but insisted on staying out of the limelight. He offers a few tantalising details about her. She is from an academic background, lives in Hamburg, and is in her early 40s. When she found out about a fish factory in Hamburg that threw away the carcasses of the dead fish, she began to collect and clean the fish scales.
“She wants to return it to the ocean…she is an extremely high IQ person, a philosopher who decided to dedicate her life to protecting animals,” he says.
Kossakovsky says it took “five years to find money and complete this project…it was not easy at all. it is so abstract that, until you see it, you don’t believe what it is.”
Details about the fish scales aren’t revealed at the start of the film. You have to wait for the final frames to discover what the woman is doing. Kossakovsky likens her to the mythical figure, Sisyphus, repeating the same task again and again but never completing it.
The woman has collected 2000 kilograms of the scales – and they needed to be transferred from Hamburg to the Norwegian locations where the film was eventually shot. At one stage, a scientist complained that putting all these fish scales back into the ocean might be “dangerous.” Kossakovsky was enraged. “I said to him take a trillion fish from the ocean is no problem but to return a little, little fraction of this, it’s a problem! Even scientists had difficulties to understand what we were doing…all these fish were supposed to die in the ocean and all bones are supposed to go down.”
Micro-organisms at the bottom of the sea, he explains, will then feed on the carcasses – but humans have disrupted the natural cycling.
Funding for Trillion came from the Norwegian Film Institute. The producers were Anita Rehoff Larsen and Tone Grøttjord-Glenne from Sant & Usant, and Joslyn Barnes from Louverture Films. Oscar Winner Joaquin Phoenix was the executive producer. Anonymous Content is handling North American sales.
