Interview with the directors of 'White Caracol' on the film, Bielargue in Morgue: Sarajevo

by August 20, 2025

Snail The new film from directors Elsa Kremser and Peter Levin ( Space Dogs ) took 10 years to conceive and shoot. A snail's pace, so to speak!

After its world premiere in competition at the Locarno Film Festival earlier this month, however, Snail was soon considered a dark horse. It ended up winning a Special Jury Prize at the venerable Swiss festival. Additionally, star Marya "Masha" Imbro and Mikhail "Misha" Senkov, who appears in the film as Masha and Misha, were honored with the Best Performance award.

Filmmakers and their stars are busy as bees, following Locarno with a spot in the fiction resource competition at the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival, which runs until August 22.

The romantic drama tells the story of a Belarusian model dreaming of a career in China who finds herself drawn to a mysterious loner who works the night shift at a morgue. “Their encounter disrupts her sense of body, beauty, and mortality,” reads a synopsis, promising “the fragile love story of two strangers who turn their world upside down and discover they are not alone.”

The story told in the film was developed based on the lives and experiences of the two stars. However, it was unscripted and largely improvised.

Intramovies is handling international sales for the Austrian co-production between producers
Lixi Frank and David Bohun of Panama Film, and Karsser and Peter of Raumzeitfilm.

In Sarajevo, Kremser and Peter spoke with Thr about what went into making Caracol represent depression and suicidal thoughts on screen and the importance of imagery and metaphors in the film.

You both mentioned that you actually worked in a morgue for a few days to prepare for the film. Can you share some insights into how this came about?

Peter Misha took us to several morgues in Minsk. This was the initial meeting. We were impressed by the appearance of dead people. It's very different from the image we see in mainstream cinema. And then we realized we needed to spend time in the morgue for practical reasons: to understand the movements there, the working methods, etc.

It was a long negotiation until we could admit medical students. We arrived with our DOP, and the person who worked at the morgue said, "No, you won't see me. This is annoying. You're going to work with me."

Karsser: "There's a lot to do here. Please give me a helping hand." It wasn't easy. And it was different for each of us. I think for DOP, it was mainly about understanding all the movements and what this job is like physically, because it's a very difficult job. I mean, human bodies are heavy. Misha, in his real life, really suffers from 20 years of working there in terms of back pain.

Of course, there was Covid when we were there. So there were many, many people in the morgue. There were no vaccinations, so for us, it was a crucial point to do this. We worked there for three weeks daily before we started shooting, also to understand Misha's natural habitat.

Péter: There's a dark but still very moving scene when they both put on makeup for this elderly woman who died. We also did these things to understand how delicate this is, how much you struggle to play, how much you think about deep things to honor these people.

The characters Misha and Masha in the film discuss suicidal thoughts and attempts. As filmmakers, how did you approach such a sensitive topic?

so we were researching many young people, not just in Belarus, talking to them to find out what the reason for it is. And there are various reasons for depression and being alone, and we tried not to make it cliché, but to understand what depression really looks like.

It's not an easy thing, because people usually hide when they're depressed, and we spoke to many people who were in contact with people who had died by suicide. The hardest thing is that you don't see it, and we wanted to show something you don't see. Because as soon as you simplify, cinematographically, and put an image together, you can be too misguided or even motivate people in the wrong way.

Peter: I think the most challenging and damaging question for young people with suicidal thoughts is the question of why. There can never be an answer. That's why it was so important that our other main character, Misha, never asks why. And it was important for us to show him in the film as someone who already knows and doesn't need to ask. And this is, for us, the deepest way to understand.

Tell us about this scene with a tree. Misha says people believe that if you take off your clothes, leave a piece of clothing on the tree, and crawl through a hole in the mala, it can help them. This seemed like shamanism. Does this tree really exist?

Karsser: During our time in Belarus, we witnessed so many young people who truly believe in all these mythological methods. We were looking for a seer, one of these old women in the villages who read water or whispers or do all these kinds of rituals. In one of the early drafts of the script, it was always a woman they would visit together. So we were pitching for such a woman, and we found several really traditional, ancient, Beylarussian women in distant villages. But we felt it was a representation of an Eastern European cliché, a post-Soviet cliché, and we didn't want to romanticize this region. But one of these ladies was actually showing us the tree and said, "They come here from Minsk all the time in fancy cars, and then they'll get naked and pass by this tree." Of course, we were impressed and thought, now we have a tool we want to use in the film, a real tree.

Peter: Most of the clothes are real. They stay there for years. And the tree was central because we didn't want to romanticize it. We also believe that in post-Soviet countries, nostalgia has been misused in the last decade in a political sense. And we don't really agree with this nostalgia. When I started finding nostalgia in art, for me, it was about aesthetics, and I think politics took over. In many countries, they try to make us believe that there is so little hope in the future that they want us to believe that everything was better in the past, so we try to play with it to show that there is a mythology. It's very important to us as a metaphor.

You mentioned metaphors and imagery. Misha paints images and has them on her body in the form of tattoos. On the other hand, Masha is pale white. I had the feeling you were playing with that too, right?

Karsser : Of course. It's even a model projection. And it has that white appearance. We can project everything onto a white wall, let's say, and in modeling school, you have to be very clean. And then the phone screen again makes things cleaner than they can be. These two surfaces, the screen and the screen she's painting on, were interesting to us. We wanted to bring them together somehow.

Péter: Also, when I think about classic adulthood, the sun and summer always bring light and hope. In Masha's case, and this is tragic for us too, it's the opposite. The sun is very damaging to her, to her skin, so she needs to hide under a guard—a chuva. But the night embraces it. It suits her much better, much better, because she can shine. That was bringing so much to the film that we could work with visually.

Do you have an idea or plan for your next project?

Karsser: There are several things on our minds. We really love shooting, so we plan to shoot soon, but we're still in the research phase, so we'll see what ideas we have.

Peter: We definitely want to continue the fiction in our own way—fictionally, I would say. This is something we want to develop further. We just hope it doesn't take too long.

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