Moderation, set in Egypt, Greece and Italy, revolves around a female horror director (Maya Lubinsky) and a screenwriter (Anna De Filippi), whose latest collaboration is haunted by encounters with its ‘raw material’ and the escalation of conflicting desires.
Faced with the disintegration of their project, the director becomes more and more drawn into conversations with the actors she has cast (Aida El Kashef, Michele Valley and Giovanni Lombardo Radice), which reflect on the way horror traverses the affective and material realities of their lives on and off screen.
Departing from certain tendencies in horror cinema from cold-war Europe, Infitah-era Egypt and Metapolitefsi Greece, that refused to naturalistically represent lived experience or to sublimate it by recourse to the irrational I have been asking myself if critical recourse to the horror genre could constitute an actual revolt of reason, in a desire to ultimately prevail, albeit in a heightened and by then barely legible state? The result is Moderation, which seeks to answer the question through the prism of the film-making process itself. |