Actually this film could be referred as a “zero budget movie”; Less than $2500 US dollars were spent on it’s production and post production. It was shot on “prosumer” class HDV camera. Most of the lighting equipment was self-made. Most of the costumes are genuine from 60’s and 70’s, found in project team members’ parents’ and grandparents’ closets. All post production was done on Arshak’s home computer and took almost a year.

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Kristina recalls: “There were only four of us on the set ninety percent of the time. Just like the film itself, the mood at the set was very intimate and friendly and in some regard even spiritual. And though all of us were paid some modest reward, we never thought in terms of someone being an employer and another one an employee. It was our movie. Our friendship had developed into something like guerilla brotherhood. And it still goes on with the same intensity.”

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Arshak tells more: “The independent statehood and the outrageously low budget had only contributed to this film, I believe. Of course, we wouldn't mind shooting it on film or on better digital format, use a little better lighting or sound recording equipment and sound professionals. But we wouldn't use more. Now I believe more than ever that every artist must clearly understand what he is achieving with his work, and then decide cautiously what artistic language, stile, instruments and means to resort to. This story couldn't have been told otherwise. I used to remember quite often the words of James Baldwin that ‘All art is a kind of confession’. All actors we've considered and have spoken to were fascinated by the script. But choice of Georgi and Kristina was seriously influenced by an observation that aside from liking the story, they have found some things in common with their characters. I had distinct feeling that this is going to be a kind of an artistic confession for all of us. And for that a studio setting with its unavoidable fakeness and dozens of people of crew around in my opinion wouldn't be a perfect place. Sometimes I try to imagine what would an established and famous director in Hollywood think seeing us coming to aunt Nano’s apartment, having coffee with her, helping her dress up her grand kids before they would go out to park, and then doing our work just four of us, and me acting as a director and boom operator simultaneously. Now I can’t help smiling when I remember this. Actually, my decision to be ‘in movies’ was made just before I finished the school. That’s why I went on to study journalism, believing that this is a better way than a film school. And later when capitalism came, whatever I did, I was doing with a clear goal in my mind, to make a fortune to become self-sufficient in financing my projects. Not much a success in that. So I was beginning to worry that time is passing and I’m still too far away from my goals. But some day, the technical progress with its new HD formats and the works of those Danish filmmakers of the well-known Dogma ’95 movement, made me think again, if the film-making is that costly an adventure, as we believed. Moreover, I’d dare to claim that the majority of the world film masterpieces were low budget. Or at least they were not too much budget sensitive. The beginning of the Italian Neorealism just after the cataclysms of WW II and the early years of the French new wave are the perfect examples of that. Those folks would get their cameras, go out to the streets, mix with crowds and just shoot. And we see the artists behind those films; everything in them is ultimately real and sincere. So in December of 2007 I was still convinced that my first film is years ahead of me, but in January 2008 I was already writing the script and arranging for production to start in April. This adventure was looking like something crazy and desperate, but I new I had some great assets giving me some hope for success, a great story and great friends and accomplices (new and old)”.



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