‘Siberia’ Exclusive Trailer: Willem Dafoe Wanders a Fever Dream in Abel Ferrara’s Trippy Berlin Premiere
Dream team Abel Ferrara and Willem Dafoe, who most recently collaborated on “Tommaso” and “Pasolini,” have done it again with the upcoming Berlinale premiere, “Siberia.” IndieWire shares the stunning first trailer for the film, which is currently seeking U.S. distribution, below. The film premieres at the Berlin Film Festival on February 24.
Throughout, star Dafoe (who recently won an Indie Spirit award for his supporting turn in “The Lighthouse”) wanders the nightmares and dreamscapes of the mind. “You’ve destroyed my life,” a woman laughingly tells him, launching Dafoe, whose character is called Clint, on a dark night of the soul across haunting set pieces. The film boasts cinematography from Stefano Falivene, who worked on Wes Anderson’s “The Life Aquatic” and also shot Ferrara’s “Pasolini.”
Here’s the official synopsis of the film, courtesy of the Berlin Film Festival. In short, we’re firmly in Ferrara country here, a world of broken men swirling among trippy images: “A man flees from one world to another that is strange and cold. Furs and fires keep him warm; a cave serves as his shelter. He is a broken man who wants to be alone. But even isolation does not bring him inner peace. Once again, he goes on a journey, this time into the self. He explores his dreams, confronts memories and seeks out visions. The rare encounters with other people are in languages he does not speak, determined by bodies that fascinate him, and by types of love he explores and then loses. His journey becomes a dance with demons, but time and again it flares up: light. In cinema history there have been many attempts to portray the mythical as something intimate, and the radical as a personal journey. But there is only one artist who is as wildly anarchistic, metaphysically mysterious, and at the same time god-obsessed and fanatical about the truth: Abel Ferrara, joining forces here once again with his acting alter ego, Willem Dafoe. While his previous film ‘Tommaso’ explored the way desire plays out in families, in ‘Siberia’ the (male) ego abandons all semblance of everyday life in a tumultuous montage. To expose and discover himself.”
Ferrara wrote the screenplay with Christ Zois, who most recently penned Ferrara’s 2014 “Welcome to New York.”
