Armed with her pocket watch, Marie-Alice heads - like the white rabbit - through the curious looking glass of Time.

In Production

SOVIETOPIA

A film by Marie Alice Wolfszahn

Marie-Alice and her film crew journey on a daring, surreal road movie through post- apocalyptic zones and futuristic utopias in the hinterlands of the former Soviet Union – to places where reality and illusion merge. The travellers come across time’s witnesses, encounter true idealists and find fantasies that have been brought to life.

The odyssey begins in the abandoned Hormone Research Laboratory of a monkey zoo accessed through a time loop. In an empty Sanatorium Palace the team meets its first hero who, helped by his cat, a Soviet plush toy & Lenin, is guarding snowbound antennae. The world’s deepest borehole take an ancient geologist’s thoughts back to visionary objectives – and women. Above the Arctic Circle the explorers momentarily become lost in thick mist and the midnight sun. In an enchanted Marine Biology Institute, an algae researcher, indulging in future-oriented science, gets them back on track. A spatial curvature leads to Stalin’s Atlantis, a sinking oil platform city where, for a merry widow, the Red Star never set. A disused diamond mine, dusty space shuttles, retro-futuristic Tesla towers, and other such mysterious relics abide – for evermore.

The past future has temperatures of -60 and +45 ̊C. Sometimes swept away in sand, sometimes swallowed up by salty waves. Rivers turn blood red, seas disappear into nothingness. The film crew hits a dead end.
But every end bears a beginning. The world reinvents itself perpetually.

The protagonists that cross the team’s path offer deep insights into dreams, daring ventures and the power of hope. Marie-Alice moulds the realities experienced and adds her own thoughts to steer her journey. The film is her instrument in a game with time –
temporal leaps, rewinding, fast forwarding, all are allowed.

Big pictures breathe in a 1:2.35 format. The cinematic images are underlined by music from the Russian band MEGAPOLIS whose album из жизни планет (About Planet’s Life) is based on scores of Soviet films that were never realised.

A documentary film, a post fiction adventure – on the trail of UTOPIA.