An ancient Greek fable about how the vulture got its strange voice is recounted in A Hawk as Big as a Horse. It is said that the bird, which “sounds like a horse shrunk to the size of a guinea pig”, wanted to imitate the large animal but couldn’t, then forgot its own call. It’s one of countless mythological echoes in a film not only captivated by, but created from, fantasies, which celebrates beings that take on other forms as a means of expressing multiple facets of themselves. It is the third feature documentary of Belarusian director Sasha Kulak, who has also made music videos and fashion films in Moscow. The film, which she calls a “documentary fairytale,” combines a stylish visual sensibility and an affinity with the creative marginalised. It makes the fantastical real and political in a manner akin to Mara (2022), which harnessed the revolutionary potential of free expression in a powerfully unique blend of performance and footage of Minsk’s anti-government protests.
Kulak visits a wooden house on the edge of the woods in Scherbinka, a remote suburb of Moscow, with her small film crew. It’s the home of a bi-gender Russian ornithologist, who now goes by the name of Lydia, about whom outlandish stories (that she believes herself to be a bird and sings like one, for instance) have been circulating. Lydia is obsessed with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and wants to recreate a version of it in Scherbinka. It’s a dream Kulak is eager to help materialise in this offbeat, multi-layered, performance-based work, the making of which is front-and-centre on screen, along with the outspoken star and her alter egos. Too slight and idiosyncratic for wide release, this charming oddity should find slots among niche festivals still open to portrayals of another, weirder Russia outside mainstream politics.
Lydia has already realised aspects of a Lynchian world through home decor that doubles as a theatre set. Red curtains and a zig-zagging chevron patterned floor mimic the distinctive Red Room, an extra-dimensional, changeable space in the forest in Twin Peaks. Here, in an elegant black shirt with white pearls, she sings “The Sycamore Trees”, a haunting song from the series, fixating us as the camera swirls around. Rather than faithfully, flatly imitating the series, Lydia is enamoured in her exploits with the spirit of making things strange that it epitomises. Audience capacities for ethereal whimsy will be tested most by the Nezhulias, mythical, grass-eating beings who Lydia refers to often, and whose tactile nature is explored through play using human elbows. In her most extravagant flight of creation, a life-size silicone doll of Lara Flynn Boyle (who plays Donna Hayward, her favourite Twin Peaks character) is crafted. Many scenes take place at night (in one, Lydia retrieves her stilettos from a man in the grass, in a twist on Cinderella), bringing a mood of nocturnal mystery to the proceedings.
A Hawk as Big as a Horse frames the complexities and fluidity of gender identity, now very topical in cinema after long being taboo, in a distinctive, mesmeric manner, while drawing into question power dynamics within the documentary form and its nature as collaboration. Kulak, positioning herself as a role-playing narrator, reveals that her conception of herself as a constant, fully defined entity has been challenged by spending time with Lydia. Lydia shares her home with her partner Vasya, who breaks in horses, but it is her relationship with her own creative practice, and that of the director, that remains the greater focus.
Kulak allows her own motivations to be scrutinised, as she and Lydia disagree over how to realise the project. Ambiguity surrounds who is leading who, as the temperamental Lydia gives directions on how to document her ornithological practices and stage her fantasies, growing irritated when Kulak’s “nonsense,” “pseudo-documentary” set-ups feel too contrived to her, or concrete matter threatens not to embody the beauty of her dreams. As exciting as it is to generate reality, fantasy proves fragile, and difficult to sustain — a tension that provides the film with its most thought-provoking moments.
Particularly evocative, too, is the film’s portrayal of a Moscow in which a concrete sense of inescapable place is blurred out or transmuted. The metropolis is just a vague twinkling of lights in the distance, while the forest is celebrated as a place where mythical creatures feel at home and reality-bending magic occurs. There are no grand political statements here, but the film touches obliquely on imaginative possibilities, and playing, as a way to change society, amid a mood not of febrile possibility so much as ever-present death and melancholy. As a film about liberty and transformation in Russia, brought into circulation through a France-based production company, it feels like the whisper from exile of a small but powerfully unorthodox voice.
Director, cinematography, editing: Sasha Kulak
Script doctor: Olga Polevikova
Cast: Lydia Katashuk
Producer: Louis Beaudemont
Animation: Elizaveta Federmesser
Music: Iakov Mironchev
Production company: Les Steppes Productions (France)
Venue: DOK Leipzig (International competition)
In Russian
74 minutes
