Like Air

Director: Elvira Dulskaia

Jako vzduch

Míša (29) and Juraj (29) are connected by a tragic childhood event – aged fifteen, they were caught in the explosion of a village transformer. They haven’t seen each other since. Both, however, carry unusual traumas, linked together more closely than they would have thought.

Míša lives in the city and doesn’t remember anything about her childhood or teenage years. A small shard is lodged in her head, a reminder of the transformer explosion and a source of constant agony. When the shard starts travelling in her body, endangering her brain, Míša is faced with the prospect of dangerous surgery. She decides to return to the village where she was born and find out what had really happened there.

Unlike Míša, Juraj had never left the village. He makes a living as the local doctor, or, more accurately, the local healer – a ‘vocation’ inherited from his father, who had a strange gift of healing. Juraj, too, has an odd trauma to remind him of the transformer incident: his senses are dulled, and he doesn’t feel pain. He heals people without knowing what they are going through. In addition, a strange ability is connected to this trauma – Juraj’s touch eases others’ pain.

When Míša runs into Juraj in the village, she finds out her headache goes away whenever he’s near. It’s unbelievable and Míša stays longer than she had intended. She spends all her time with Juraj, eager to escape her pain, and soon enough, memories of her childhood start resurfacing. Míša immerses herself in them, diving deeper and deeper. It’s not easy: to remember an event, she must go through it again, in the same place and in the same way as before. Juraj helps her – after all, they had spent most of their childhood together. At first, Míša is thrilled to play this entertaining game. As she rediscovers her memories, though, she also starts having strange visions. She sees dead relatives. Things that had never happened to her. It soon becomes obvious that she, too, has a strange ability, completely different to Juraj’s. She can communicate with the incorporeal world. She cannot control this gift, though, and hardly even believes it’s possible.

Juraj has his own plans with Míša. He hopes to re-enact the day of the explosion, and, in doing so, bring back the past. It would only be for a moment, but they could, perhaps, be able to leave their traumas behind. He starts preparing a ritual  and waits for a storm, as a storm had originally caused the transformer to explode.

It soon turns out, though, that some things cannot be repeated. Míša and Juraj are not the same people anymore. One  cannot simply bring the past. As teenagers, Míša and Juraj were in love.
They had been planning to run away. Now, however, Míša doesn’t feel that way anymore. Juraj changes his plan. The two of them had – miraculously – survived the original explosion; this time around, Juraj wants to sacrifice Míša and claim her gift for himself. It’s his birth right, after all. The two abilities had belonged to Juraj’s father, who had also died in the explosion. Upon his death, his gift had split between the only two witnesses – Juraj and Míša.

When Míša and Juraj re-enact the day of the explosion, the past and the present start blending into each other. Juraj and Míša are drawn into the vortex, as is the world around them. The village is caught in a ritual that pulls it back into the past, until it reaches a state of magical timelessness. The two must, once again, live through the explosion – as well as the death that follows. Only then can they truly leave their traumas behind.