Love may be in the air this Valentine’s Day, but Berlin had better get ready to be consumed by Lust. A prison parole officer faces her past through an unlikely journey of control and intimacy after the death of her long-absent father in Ralitza Petrova’s sophomore feature of that name.
The movie will world premiere in the Forum program at the Berlin International Film Festival on Monday, Feb. 16. Petrova’s 2016 debut feature, Godless, debuted at the Locarno Film Festival, winning the Golden Leopard for best film.
Lust is about Lilian, a parole officer whose life is governed by clinical precision, with her body, emotions, and desires held under strict control. “When she is summoned back to her hometown to settle the death of an absent father, what should be a brief administrative detour unravels into unresolved debts, institutional inertia, and a decaying body caught in bureaucratic limbo,” explains a synopsis. “Moving through offices, hotel rooms, and abandoned dwellings, Lust charts a descent into proximity – with grief, flesh, and a desire long anesthetized. An uneasy connection with a Shibari rigger offers a practice of controlled vulnerability, where intimacy is negotiated rather than promised.” Shibari is Japanese rope bondage.
Snejanka Mihaylova stars in Lust, along with Nikola Mutafov, Mihail Milchev, and Alexis Atmadjov.
“In 2016, my father passed away – someone I barely knew,” explains Petrova. “What followed was not conventional grief, but the mourning of an absence already in place. Lust emerged from this space as a way of framing what is missing and how it lingers. I wanted the film to observe with a minimalist gaze the emptiness left by absent fathers, and how daughters carry that weight. Conceived as a coming-of-mid-age psychodrama, Lust moves between mystery, fantasy, and ghost story – not to resolve absence, but to trace how it unsettles control and, at times, creates an opening.”
‘Lust’
Courtesy of Aporia Filmworks/Screening Emotions
Lust was produced by Petrova for Aporia Filmworks in Bulgaria, in collaboration with Nikolay Todorov and Poli Angelova for Screening Emotions in Bulgaria, and co-produced by Denmark’s Snowglobe and Sweden’s Silver Films, with backing by the Bulgarian National Film Center, Danish Film Institute, Film I Vast and Eurimages. Inwave Films is handling international sales.
THR can now exclusively premiere the trailer for Lust, hinting at the restrained mix of trauma, emptiness, tenderness, and austerity that awaits us. Handle with care!