“Bite Me!” by Sergei Safiullin

“Bite Me!” is an interesting movie that can combine an important theme with a fascinating visual style. The format of short films is perfect to create this kind of experimentations, in which the talent of a director can emerge in its pure form, without any worries about budget and production.                                                                                                            This movie is a great example of this kind of approach. The story is simple, there are few characters and just one location but everything mixed together express a powerful movie in the incredible time of five minutes. Despite the agility of the story, Safiullin is able to build a thrilling and hallucinated aestethics with a great use of colours and brave camera movements. Using a risky and apparently bizarre word, when you look at “Bite Me!” you get the impression of being in a “toxic” universe where everything is going in the wrong way. Just a talented visual storyteller could transmit these strange and disturbing set of emotions. About that, it is necessary to mention the use of the camera, structured in a thrilling “Point of View” approach. This choice is maybe the key point of the entire movie, because, as happens in great films, it’s not just a stylistic option, but an important element for the amazing final, revealing how painful could be to be a victim, even when the victim becomes the tormentor.

Beyond his undoubted abilities, Safiullin reveals himself as a courageous author capable of expressing and showing delicate but extremely important themes in a hard and perhaps shocking way. We certainly need this kind of storytellers, because reality sometimes deserves to be denounced as it is, without leaving the possibility for viewers to hide behind fiction. Safiullin is a director who can tell the reality in this way, thanks to his sensitivity and his visual skills.