I'm Anna Davydova. Russian born, Texas raised, Paris based. Which sounds like the beginning of a joke and honestly sometimes feels like one.
I make films. Specifically, I make the kind of films where something is deeply wrong and nobody can quite put their finger on what. That's not a genre description, that's just my personality.
I came to Paris to study film directing at ESRA without ever having visited France first. I knew it from movies and pop culture, thought it seemed like a great idea, packed my bags. Still think it was a great idea. The French take their cinema more seriously than most people take anything, which is either the most intimidating or most refreshing thing depending on the day.
I'm drawn to horror, but not the kind with a killer running around trying to kill everyone or a monster around every corner. I'm more interested in dread. That very specific feeling that shows up before the bad thing happens, when your body already knows something your brain is still catching up to. I grew up reading Junji Ito and Shintaro Kago, two manga artists who understood that the scariest thing isn't what's in the room with you. It's what happens when the mind that's trying to make sense of the room starts to go. Once the mind goes, what do you have left? And then what even is reality? I think about this a lot. Probably too much.
I use genre as a tool, not a destination. Take a real situation. A family, a relationship, something recognizably human and broken. Run it through a surrealist lens until what was invisible becomes impossible to look away from. Cinema is the only medium where you can actually show what's happening inside a person's head. I find it criminal that more people don't take advantage of that.
Growing up Russian in United States, where Russians were reliably cast as the villain, does something interesting to your sense of self. I have the classic immigrant problem: too American for Russia, too Russian for United States, not French enough for Paris. I've stopped trying to find the country where I fit and started building home out of daily rituals and people I choose. My characters tend to have the same problem. They're lost at the start of every story but they don't know it yet. They think lost is just what normal feels like. Most of them don't get a clean ending. I've never experienced easy, so I don't like to write it.
In two years I've written and directed six short films. Most of them are dramatic, not horror, and that's deliberate. I wanted to learn how to tell a story that holds together before I start breaking them apart.
Up until now, all my shorts have been self-produced, two of them crossed borders on their own, screened in Canada, England, and the United States, without a production company behind them. The Author won Best International Drama and Best International Actor at the 300 Seconds Short Film Festival. Threads of Life was selected at Ealing Film Festival and received an honorable mention at the International Social Change Film Festival. I'm currently developing EMMA, my first professionally produced short.
I probably should have hired a producer sooner. Live and learn.
-AD
