Visions of Suffering

Russia  |  2017  |  85 minutes | Director: Andrey Iskanov

After losing his girlfriend because of his obsession with necrophilia, death and a morbi fascination for decomposing human bodies, Sasha falls into despair. He suffers dreadful nightmares where he is wandering a dead otherworldly forest filled with fog and strange creatures. But the dream and the reality mix, when he meets a demonic shaman and a mysterious phone repairer finds him his defective line in the middle of the night…

To save himself, Sasha ventures into a world of no shapes, inhabited by tormenting vampires, seductive lesbians and demons lurking in every shadow, bringing death and obliteration in their path. Considered one of the masters of extreme underground  and experimental horror cinema, alongside directors such as Marian Dora or Karim Hussain, Iskanov marks his inevitable return after 12 years of Visions of Suffering (2006), that never really satisfied him, and get the chance to make a completely diferent film.

Andrey Iskanov, born in 1976 in Khabarovsk, Russia, is a professional photographer and cinematographer, filming for movies and advertising, as well as a professional makeup artist and special effects designer. Previously a student at a medical institute, he developed a keen interest in photographing images, which became his business and brought him an award for achievements in the field of photographic advertising in 1997. In Russia and China, he made several personal exhibitions of his work.

The director worked as a newspaper photographer ("Arguments and the Facts", "The Amur Meridian" etc.) and engaged in the creation of portfolios and photographic training for national and foreign models. In 2003, he made two feature films for his surreal fantasy film series HalluCinoGeNnN - "Nails" and "Visions of Suffering": the former being a social horror film in Lynch's "Eraserhead" style and Tsukamoto's "Tetsuo", and the latter a bizarre and supernatural horror film that fits the author's "film-dream" concept. In 2008, Iskanov made the over 4 hours long "Philosophy of a Knife", a very disturbing historical film about Japanese Unity 731 and their cruel human experiments against Chinese and Russians. The film was officially banned in Germany and all copies were confiscated. Iskanov's last film, "Ingression" (2009), debuted at BUT Underground and the Trash Film Festival in the Netherlands, and received the White Lady award at HOFF in Estonia.