Director: Alexander Hahn
Written by: Martin Leidenfrost
Producer: Guntis Trekteris
Production: EGO MEDIA

synopsis

Andris is a pharmaceuticals salesman around forty, earns well, is divorced and a failure. He races along a country road in the night and causes a serious accident. Shocked, he staggers out. The female passenger of the other car is dead, the female driver is motionless. Is she dead? Rooted to the spot, he stares at the young woman. He loses his nerve. He flees.

Ljuba was a party girl, tantalizing, playful, desirable. She touches her leg in the hospital and is horrified: it is as if she is touching somebody else’s skin. She becomes wheelchair-bound and remains crippled for the rest of her life.

Ljuba becomes bitter. She withdraws, rejects her friends and trains her arms obsessively. She refuses to be dependent on anybody, she pushes herself around alone in her wheelchair. Ljuba is driven by only one wish: to find the guilty driver and punish him. Police investigations don’t get very far. Ljuba buys herself an electric shock pistol.

Following the hit-and-run accident, Andris goes off the rails. He is agitated, nervous, tormented by feelings of guilt. Since nothing else will give him peace, he seeks out the unknown woman from the night of the accident. He finds out who she is and where she lives. He moves into the same block of flats in which Ljuba lives.

Andris wants to make good his guilt. When he meets Ljuba in the lift, he offers her his help, but she brusquely rejects him. Later she comes back to him, because she could do with a chauffeur in her hunt for the culprit. Andris drives her all over and tolerates her off-hand manner. She has herself taken to the scene of the accident and looks for clues. Andris watches her fearfully. She photographs every detail, the asphalt, the verge, the grass. She has the photos enlarged and covers the walls of her apartment with them. At night she stares at the pictures. There is nothing to be seen.

Ljuba has no idea that Andris is the man she is hunting down, full of hate. She becomes used to him, begins to trust him. He wants to confess to her. He yearns for the opportunity. He takes the plunge and gropes for the right words. But he doesn’t find the courage.
Ljuba begins to come out of her shell, she finds enjoyment in life once more, she comes to terms with her crippled body. She trusts Andris so much that she sleeps with him. She falls in love with him. And so she comes ever closer to the guilty man.



director’s note

“Ogre” is a non-everyday love story between a Russian woman living in Latvia and a Latvian returned from America. Latvia is my homeland, which I am always returning to and which I am always leaving.

I was able to gain MARTIN LEIDENFROST, an Austrian scriptwriter living in Bratislava, as a co-author. Martin is an expert on Eastern Europe and won the “Writing for CEE” prize in 2007 for stories from Eastern Europe.

These stories have been swimming around my head for several years. A Polish girl is responsible for that - I met her late at night on the Internet. She called herself “Bittermoon” and loved the films of Roman Polanski. She was wonderful and she was also wheelchair-bound.

“When it was clear to me that I would never walk again”, she wrote, “I threw all of my shoes out of the window.” That could be a wonderful opening image for a film.

The story of “Bittermoon” is not the story of our Ljuba – but she has Bittermoon’s humour, her acute powers of observation, her lack of self-pity.

Ljuba – I would very much like to put CHULPAN KHAMATOVA in the role, with whom I have already worked on “Midsummer Madness”.

Ljuba pretty quickly comes to terms with the fact that she can’t walk any more. But she can’t come to terms at all with the fact the police can’t find the person who brought her to this fate. Ljuba wants revenge. But whoever is expecting a film like “Death Wish”, is going to be disappointed.

Ljuba forgives the perpetrator in the end. But he wounds her a second time – this time he breaks her heart.

We know the perpetrator from the beginning. My first choice for the leading male part is KEVIN SPACEY. He causes a car accident, but instead of immediately helping, Andris flees. But before that he has to let the air out of the airbag, while Ljuba is gasping for air. This scene lasts relatively long and should be painful. Such as in the taxi murder scene in Kieslowski’s “A Short Film About Killing”. Andris is tormented by feelings of guilt: he finds Ljuba, he observes her, he moves into an apartment in the high-rise building Ljuba lives in. He becomes addicted to his surveillance of her: He builds a mini-camera into a model helicopter – so that he can look into Ljuba’s apartment when he wants to. Something like James Stewart in Hitchcock’s “Rear Window”.

In “Ogre”, I want the act and its perpetrator to be clear right from the beginning. Thus a catastrophe film takes place, which doesn’t present a scheme of caricature-like normality and then allows the catastrophe to follow as a cathartic shock. It is about the fault lines people have to live with afterwards. Ljuba wants revenge, Andris forgiveness. Thus their love for one another fulfils the function of a catalyst.

I would like JERZY PALACZ again as cameraman (DOP of Ulrich Seidl’s “Models” and “Jesus, You Know”, among others), who was also camera on “Midsummer Madness”. “Midsummer Madness” was a very bright, glossy film. “Ogre” is visually the exact opposite.

The main language would be English (which should please quite a few producers). I like to tell stories of emigrants, who sometimes speak English well and sometimes badly.