A stubborn stage actor navigates single fatherhood, a strenuous theatre project, an adulterous love affair, and the confounding dreams awakened by a puzzling street encounter with a mysterious stranger.
In the historic Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, despite the cruel war that has been raging since 2014 between the self-proclaimed People's Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and the Ukrainian government, people try to survive in the rotten heart of chaos, where violence disguises itself as peace, propaganda becomes univocal truth and hatred reigns in the name of love.
Who is he – Borgman, the iconoclast? Is he a real human being, or a fusion of fears and anger, hiding behind layers of respectability, prosperity and carelessness? Is he a demon from nightmares, or an allegory, or an embodiment of all human fears come alive—like an evil spirit on the loose.
Disturbed and exiled from his shelter, he arises from nowhere, and a steady life of an ordinary family will never be the same...Apocalypses is a recurrent dream, that one can forget about, but cannot get recovered from.
"Borgman" is like a complex puzzle, a maze constructed from passion, nightmares and exposed horrors, put in a frame of a surreal thriller.
Shot in unique style of the ideologist of the European absurd, this magnetic puzzle became the most obscure, harsh and sophisticated creation of the director, who possesses devilish fantasy and precise, abrupt impulse. He wildly plays with mythology, as well as with pictorial, literary and biblical motives.
Cast: Jan Bijvoet, Hadewych Minis, Jeroen Perceval, Alex van Warmerdam, Tom Dewispelaere, Elve Lijbaart
Directed by Alex van Warmerdam