Nine

“I guess when you are starting, it does not matter with what.” (Iron Man)

Team

Andris Feldmanis

EstoniaScriptwriter

Livia Ulman

EstoniaScriptwriter

synopsis

Warsaw, 1997, the heyday of cowboy capitalism. Pawel wakes up in his trashed up apartment and receives a phone call: he has three days to pay back the money he had borrowed to open his lingerie store. He is already six months behind with the payments. Pawel heads out into the desolate Warsaw autumn, looking for the money. He visits old friends from the past, but none of them are willing or able to lend him the money. All of them seem to have reached a dead end in one way or the other, reflecting an overwhelming crisis of identity that plagued (and often still does) all the post-Soviet societies. Pawel’s path crosses with Bolek’s, a successful gangster, who has it all, but is battling an existential crisis, and with Jacek’s, who is trying to set up a drug business but is slowly succumbing to the poison himself. Coming from different situations they are all driven by the same gnawing feeling of meaninglessness, which forces them to hang on to the past and makes them disconnected from their lives in the present. Their self-centered fixation makes them blind to the doom that awaits the people close to them.

Director’statement

Nine is set up like a classic thriller or crime film – the protagonist has borrowed money from the mafia, is unable to pay it back on time and now has a last chance to repay the loan. Underneath its genre roots, there is a story about a specific place and time in history, the post-Soviet reality after the Soviet Union’s collapse and the early days of capitalism. It explores the themes of identity in transitional social conditions through an existentialist paradigm. The story is constructed as an ensemble piece, comprising four main characters and a few significant side characters, creating a multi-stranded plot following events unwinding simultaneously. It also operates in different time layers, a significant part of the narrative is made up of flashbacks. While this lends a richness to the literary narrative, it creates many challenges in the medium of film, which is more plot-centered. While trying to stay true to the essence of the book, we worked towards making the characters legible through events taking place in the present and through dialogue, avoiding flashbacks, which worked very well in the literary format, but would be too disruptive to the flow of the story in film. The main challenge of adapting Nine for the screen is to transpose or translate the poetry of the literary narrative (flashbacks, descriptions, inner thoughts and feelings of characters) into the medium of film. Nine is in essence a very visual film – the characters’ wanderings in the post-Soviet city of Warsaw, a huge and anonymous anatomy of roads, streets, streetcars, trolleybuses, and its blood – the people who form an incessant movement in these pathways. Against this backdrop the questions of identity, fate and chance are being asked. What defines a person? What gives meaning to being? How much of a person’s identity is rooted in his time and society? Coming from Estonia, which regained its independence in 1991 after a 50-year-long Soviet occupation, the setting and the themes (both social and personal) in Nine are very familiar to us. However, as storytellers we feel that the film should not only speak to people who share a similar past, but should deal with issues that hold a universal interest.

TFL PROGRAMME:

AdaptLab 2014

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