Elena Guseva

Sic the Bear

Elena Guseva’s Sic the Bear is a film for teenagers and young people about three friends who set off for the dacha and become witnesses to a very strange story.

The narrative is told in the first person: everything we see onscreen was shot with a video camera by the movie characters themselves, and the audience’s view of events constantly switches between them.

This method of filming and improvised spontaneous performances from the actors (almost none of the dialogues were written down in advance) creates a vector of reflections on how the fake and real are related, what is imitation, what the world of children’s and teenagers’ phantasms formed by digital media actually represents and, finally, reflections on the modern obsessional striving to record and publish events from everyday life on social networks. If you didn’t shoot it or post it, did it really happen? And what about the things you can’t record: growing sensibilities, friendship, love, imaginary or real fears, dreams about the world of grown-ups and growing up for real? Where does our childhood go and how are childhood fears transformed? What do the characters in the film really see? And how truthful are the things we see on YouTube? The authors and heroes of this light-hearted phantasmagorical film ask these questions, among others.

Elena Guseva
Video filmmaker, photographer, journalist. Graduated from the department of journalism, Moscow State University and Kirill Preobrazhensky’s New Media workshop at the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia.