Abel Ferrara and Willem Dafoe are one of those cinematic duos that doesn’t instantly come to mind, but every time they reunite you remember why they’re so great together. Having previously collaborated on Tommaso and Pasolini, they’re back for the nightmarish Siberia, which is due to premiere at the Berlin Film Festival.
The entire trailer finds Dafoe traversing a Hellish dreamscape, encountering many sinister figures including a woman who mockingly tells him “You destroyed my life”! The scary visuals are provided by cinematographer Stefano Falivene, who worked with Ferrara on Pasolini. Ferrara directs from a script he co-wrote with Chris Zoist, having previously collaborated on 2014’s Welcome to New York.
Following on his Spirit Award-winning performance in The Lighthouse, Dafoe seems trapped in a dark journey of the soul he may never escape from.
SYNOPSIS: “A man flees from one world to another that is strange and cold. Furs and fires keep him warm; a cave serves as his shelter. He is a broken man who wants to be alone. But even isolation does not bring him inner peace. Once again, he goes on a journey, this time into the self. He explores his dreams, confronts memories and seeks out visions. The rare encounters with other people are in languages he does not speak, determined by bodies that fascinate him, and by types of love he explores and then loses. His journey becomes a dance with demons, but time and again it flares up: light. In cinema history there have been many attempts to portray the mythical as something intimate, and the radical as a personal journey. But there is only one artist who is as wildly anarchistic, metaphysically mysterious, and at the same time god-obsessed and fanatical about the truth: Abel Ferrara, joining forces here once again with his acting alter ego, Willem Dafoe. While his previous film ‘Tommaso’ explored the way desire plays out in families, in ‘Siberia’ the (male) ego abandons all semblance of everyday life in a tumultuous montage. To expose and discover himself.”
