Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter: It’s Always About the Emotional Truth

“For us, the most important thing is that we do everything”, say Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter, who bring to Sarajevo White Snail, fragile love story of two outsiders.

 

 

The transition from documentary to fiction wasn’t really a big shift for us. In all our work, we’ve always followed a cinematic vision first and asked ourselves: what tools best express the emotional core of the story? With Space Dogs and Dreaming Dogs, that meant inhabiting the perspective of dogs and using the cinema space to evoke that experience. In White Snail, the starting point was two human characters - their confrontation with death, loneliness, and isolation, and above all, the attempt to understand one another. It’s always about the emotional truth, regardless of whether it’s fiction or documentary.

 

 

For us, the most important thing is that we do everything together - writing, directing, producing, researching. We rarely divide tasks, because we also share our lives, so we’re used to sharing every thought and creative impulse. That makes both co-writing and co-directing feel like a very natural flow rather than a challenge. Disagreements are rare, because we spend years in preparation talking through every detail, shaping a shared vision. So if a scene doesn’t feel right, we usually don’t even need to explain why. we just know, based on that deep foundation. The same goes for writing.

 

 

The story of White Snail began with a real encounter about ten years ago. We met Misha (Mikhail Senkov), the male lead, in Minsk, and he had actually worked in a morgue for twenty years and was also a painter. Masha (Marya Imbro), who we later cast, is also a real-life model. Over the long development process, the story evolved from their real lives. We spent a lot of time with both of them. Not just interviewing, but truly immersing ourselves in their worlds. We went to numerous model schools, spent time in morgues, met their families. What fascinated us was the collision of two very different perspectives on the human body: Misha’s, shaped by death and decay, and Masha’s, shaped by beauty standards and self-doubt. Both of them deal with the image of the body - just in radically different ways.

 

 

Our approach was to create spaces and situations that felt fresh and surprising for them. Each of them only knew their character’s side of the story - Marya knew only what her character knows, and the same went for Mikhail. In fact, they hadn’t even met before the first day of shooting. Since we shot mostly chronologically, their connection developed on screen in parallel with their real-life interaction. So the story of two people getting to know each other unfolded within a fictional frame - but through a real, unscripted process of discovery.

 

 

All of the oil paintings in the film are part of Mikhail’s real artistic work. As we mentioned, beyond his job at the morgue, he’s also a painter who studied at the Art Academy in Belarus. His entire body of work is shaped by the daily encounters he’s had with death and decay. The apartment you see in the film is a highly accurate recreation of his real home - the one he shared with his mother and where we first met him many years ago.

 

Just like Masha in the film, when we first entered that space, we were overwhelmed by these enormous canvases. They were painted inside the apartment and are too large to even fit through the door. So they are, in a way, physically and metaphorically trapped there.

 

 

A central theme of the film is the way we look at bodies: the living body, often seen through a lens of insecurity and self-doubt, and the dead body, lying in the morgue, a state every human being will eventually reach. After our own first encounter with a dead body, we were deeply shaken. It made us realize how little we actually understood about death - what it means, what it looks like, what it feels like to confront it.

 

As filmmakers, we’re drawn to questions we don’t have answers to, and this was one of them. Misha, the character, gave us a gateway into this world. But beyond that, we also wanted to engage with it on a practical level. Together with our DOP Mikhail Khursevich, we actually did an internship in a morgue to understand the work, the space, and the emotional and physical reality of that environment.

 

That process helped us find the right cinematic language. One that treats this space not only as a place of scientific procedure, but as a liminal moment between life and mourning, where intimacy can exist even amid death and decay.

 

 

Working with our cinematographer, Mikhail Khursevich, was absolutely central to the development of the entire project. Mikhail was born and raised in Belarus, studied at the national film school there, and now lives in Georgia. Since we’re not from Belarus ourselves, it was very important for us to collaborate with someone who knows the place deeply, someone rooted in its culture and everyday reality. We also felt a strong responsibility to portray Belarus in a way that feels direct and intimate, but avoids reinforcing Western clichés about post-Soviet countries.

 

Visually, we focused on staying close to the emotional worlds of Masha and Mikhail. Both characters are outsiders, not integrated into the mainstream of society, and we wanted the camera to reflect their internal states, their isolation, and their very specific, narrow perspective on life.

 

 

What matters most to us in making films, especially when we dedicate ourselves so intensely to a subject over many years, is the experience of encountering people and perspectives we might otherwise never have crossed paths with. That’s something we find deeply fulfilling on a personal level.

 

With White Snail, our hope is to bring that spirit into the cinema, to offer space for those who may feel unseen, disconnected, or burdened by self-doubt and loneliness. We hope that viewers who relate to that might feel recognized in some way. And maybe they'll be reminded that it’s worth taking risks, worth stepping beyond your comfort zone because connection can come from the most unexpected places.