infocused - a short thriller about students in danger

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Six students find themselves in a gravely dangerous classroom, and their mechanical teacher, probably, turns off. What shall they do? Is there a way to safely escape? What secret is hidden outside?

Infocused is a 5-minute film about collective thinking, escape rooms and mechanical killing machines, all taking place in a single dark basement. It was important for me as a director to create a space, a micro-world with its own rules, in which somthing very unusual has happened. Students in the film are literally learning to speak, to communicate and to move. It's surely not a pretentios auteur film, but a short and intriguing thriller, also having some parallels to a social and political life.

w a t c h a f i l m h e r e :

We made a film a team of 6 student screenwriters (not the same people as those who took part) in a couple of month, though the script itself was the toughest and the longest part of work. I've shot the whole project in a single 500-year old monastery basement in Vilnius old town, with the helping hand of my colleagus from European Humanities University. The whole film was made possible by the University and its creative and awesome students, who co-written the film, took part in it, and helped to spread the world about it. So, praise to the students, let there be less dangers to all of the student community.

One more thing to note is that the film was shot in 2019 by an entirely Belarusian team, more than a year before Belarusian Protests 2020 happened. After and during those events, thousands of Belarusian students have been detained, many of them are still in prison, and even more were forced to exile. The whole student community, which was slowly building up, was entirely crushed, and those events strike many parallels with the movie. I really hope that the ending of our real-world saga will be more lighthearted, than that of the film, yet it is hard to believe.

And here is an ominous poster, with all the characters and a main villain:

the poster was created by Viktoria Putsko, who also played part in a film as one of 6 students

I'm in love with shooting films like this, with creating worlds, making movements, directing groups of people on such projects. That's what means filmmaking to me.

In less than a year after completing the film, I have started a film company of my own, where our team is creating both artistic and commercial films. We are putting some cinema magic, as well as engaging narratives and dynamic watching experience into all of our works, be it a 40-minutes long experimental projection for theatre, a long documentary, or a 30-second brand movie.

Lodka may do a film in any city or place, if we like the idea of it. Contact me or our mail at lodkaproduction@gmail.com to make a film with us. By the way, we also do 3d films and many new formats!