Director´s notes
Art has been a part of my life since my early childhood. It has been my joy and pain. For many years, Icarried with me the idea of a film about a young man's obsession with becoming an artist. I wanted to capture this sense of out-of-time passion that could whisk you into a dizzy pursuit of a crazy dream. I saw images, I felt the fluidity of motion, but was yet to arrive at a story.One sleepless night, I was listening toThis American Life, a radio show I have been following for years. The featured story sent me back in time to my teens, when fed up with how "phony" everything and everyone was, I decided to quit art school and move to a remote village, where a painter I idealized at the time had lived decades earlier. Somehow, I imagined that just by living there, by osmosis, I could absorb some of his greatness. The memory of this episode gave me the idea for a story about a Holden Caulfield-like character who sets out to look for his idol, an enigmatic painter living in seclusion, not unlike J. D. Salinger.
I wanted to create a lost and confused character, who, while in pursuit of his romantic dream tries to grab on to the people he meets on the road, hoping to gain their emotional support and understanding. This character became Pavel, a 16-year-old boy withborderline Asperger disorder. From the very beginningI knew that the key to translating the story into film successfully would be to show the events as witnessed and experienced by the young protagonist. My initial intention was to do so within a fragmented structure, resembling memory patterns. I wanted the film to be a reflection of a series of life-altering events, reimagined through the prism of time. In the process of developing the script however, I lost the thread to this initial and core aspect of the film and veered toward a more linear narrative, and not unlike young Pavel, temporarily lost my way. The results left me dissatisfied till the very last stages of editing. One day, while out for a walk in the woods near Berlin, I experienced another serendipitous moment. I suddenly realized that if I were to tell the story in reverse, I could regain the sense of distance, the sense of emotional memory and suspended time, I had first envisioned. It was at that point when the story I had conceived years earlier finally found its unique tone and language. So, here it is -Light Thereafter, Pavel’sjourney, as well as my own.