Scales

On a road trip along the California coast, a woman drifts through fleeting encounters and cinematic illusions, where ambiguous pleasure opens a path toward becoming.

“Scales” intertwines memory, fantasy, “reality”, and the tangible non-discursive slivers of their interplay, the moving audiovisual images. Blending personal video archives, performed scenes, and experimental sound, it explores the entangled relationship between trauma and pleasure. Shot primarily in California, the film draws on vivid landscapes and surreal aesthetics that echo spaces from the protagonist’s childhood in Ukraine. Through a fragmented, non-linear narrative and a textured soundscape, “Scales” delves into the inner life of a heroine caught in a loop of traumatic repetition navigated through pleasure – not as resolution, but as a resistant mode of reclaiming gaze and agency via weaving the film’s fabric.

Programme section: New Talents Competition
Original title: Scales | Year: 2024 | Duration: 13′
Country: Ukraine | Language: English | Subtitles: English
Director: Anna Scherbyna | Production: Anna Scherbyna | Cast: Anna Scherbyna | Cinematography: Anna Scherbyna, Denys Voloshyn, Giorgio D’ausilio, Mitya Churikovr | Editing: Anna Scherbyna | Sound: Uliana Bychenkova

FESTIVALS & AWARDS (SELECTION) 

e-flux Film Award, 2024 – Honorary Mention

DIRECTOR’S BIO

Anna Scherbyna is a Ukrainian-born artist, filmmaker, and curator based in Berlin. Drawing from her background in painting, Scherbyna integrates a painterly perspective into her filmmaking, expanding her exploration of perceptual modalities to delve beyond the surface of the image. In the intersection of disciplines of her cinematic exploration, she seeks to uncover the unseen and unspoken. Her work consistently examines the margins of representation, embracing disruption and fragmentation as methods to challenge hegemonic narratives.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

Once again, I found myself in a risky situation with a camera. Out of that moment, the film began as a way of surviving by documenting the psyche’s compulsion to re-live and re-write traumatic stories. I work with open-ended, fragmented structures, where narrative emerges in repetitions and unfinished processes, fragile and unresolved, yet resonant. My painterly background shapes both the shot and the montage: I treat each frame as a brushstroke that unfolds over time, and editing as a form of composition, similar to painting on canvas. My films seek to make visible the tensions between structured perception and what resists representation, turning rupture itself into a site of experience and agency.