It was so loud because of the traffic and a crowd on Kenmare and Bowery… unbearable it was, correlating completely with whatever it was going on in my head. I was standing on the corner and had to step on a certain manhole 108 times. Everything seemed okay, but I couldn’t move. The idea of Beware of Dog stems from my history with OCD and immigration, and poeticizing it into a motion picture was my way of getting it out of my head to understand what was happening to me in my life and mind more intelligibly.
We are all self-concentrated egoists who just want to be seen and heard. It's more often than not we write about our life experiences and traumas, but in this case, I wanted to raise awareness on mental health. This was a way of entertaining, showing the beauty of a portrait of time to the world through cinematography, and the instincts that light up in us while watching something meaningful or relatable.

During my upbringing, I grew up and lived under the influences of multiple cultures – Russia and the United States, primarily – but traveling often and having close relatives in Germany. I wanted to honor the places that molded me into who I am. As one psychiatrist said, the fact that I couldn’t concentrate on only one character emphasizes my indecisive personality.

I experienced it introspectively. The inner self-research diffused into a generational observation of time in big city realms. A lot of people struggle with mental deviations, and when I was sharing my story with friends, I often was getting, ‘I understand’ and ‘I feel ya’ responses. It felt right to make something and cover a theme that you don’t see in movies often, yet is extremely relatable to a lot of people whether they are comfortable admitting or not.
The cognitive changes over the past few years provide us a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over a reason, social connections over individual choice, perceptiveness over I.Q. I had OCD, I lived through it and am still conquering; now, it brings more joy than struggle having more control over it with each passing day.

We are drowning in screens every day; they bring joy, anxiety, despair, laughter. It just seemed to make sense, including this extension of self in the film. The main reason to use the digital intermissions is to shrink the space between characters and emphasize the commonality of each story, no matter what part of the world we live in. The ensemble of protagonists connects online: physical locations are juxtaposed with digital space.

Sometimes, it feels like we need less and fewer people in our lives. Physical human connection becomes luxury in a world of online self-concentration and presentation. Also, not a lot of people can confront mental issues – if it’s not visible, it might not even exist. So we hide it until it becomes unbearable. The cure for it, from my own experience, is a connection with someone who understands you and is willing to build something bigger than themselves, visceral reciprocity. It can be a project, like we did with Lilit, or it can be a personal emotional experience with a person you love. The importance of it is in fulfilling communication and creating a good thing outside of ‘I’ – for others.

In Marina’s story, there is an inner stream of consciousness that grows the obsession and makes her have repetitive tendencies. She wants ‘to get over it’, but somehow creating an even bigger obsession. In Mike’s story, it is a self-analytical narration, a personal story he shares with the audience, it is much more graphic and real. They are both reflections of an outside world projected from the prism of their personal psyches.

This aspect of cinematography brings us closer to the characters, we see them more intimately, we breathe their air and think their thoughts. The raw style depicts their unstable conditions; through the visual tools, we experience and feel for them as opposed to compositionally static shots where the audience can just observe. Handheld brings empathy and makes the audience feel differently for the characters.

I always incline towards dream sequences as a powerful moviemaking tool – that’s what separates the genre from just documenting reality. The goal of these scenes was to express an emotion, the audience can interpret it however they feel, it doesn’t have to be objective or discreet. The extremity of what is interpreted as a break can be the norm for some. We can often lose track of our own reality quickly, become lost in our mind from outside influence or even our own inner monologue.

Despite my pessimistic nature, I do believe in a light at the end of the often gloomy tunnel of lives many ups and downs. Despite my Russian origins, where all the movies have Zvyagintsev’s motifs of hopelessness, despair, and inability to resist the system, I wanted to have all the harshness, but intertwine it with the American ‘happy ending’ resolution, while still leaving it with an open end.