THE BESIEGED FORTRESS
Film, 2022

In ‘ The Besieged Fortress’, the artist employs documentary devices. The narration features a protagonist researching into the question presented in the movie, namely ‘what does a human being feel, staying in a besieged fortress?’.
The artist presumes that melancholy is the feeling most similar to that.
Having found himself at the dusk of the Oedipus complex, the protagonist makes his final decision. The main question is that of the law: ‘Do you acknowledge my Law?’, where by the law, we understand a way of dealing with lack.
During a siege, this question loses its relevance, because in the fortress, there is chaos, the inhabitants necessarily expect either the survival of the existing system or its failure and dissipation with the following substitution. To the protagonist, the siege implies a hope of deliverance from the symbolic death, he even develops a desire long-forgotten, hidden behind the pleasure of self-torture.
The protagonist experiences a maniacal bout, trying to calm everyone down, forgetting the necessity to constantly maintain the guise. He indulges in an utterly straightforward, shameless state of the subject, allowed to enjoy the manic psychosis, affectively juggling signified, stripped of any sense to him. In an urge to find a foundation, the subject forgets about the melancholic catastrophe, as all the inhabitants of the fortress do, experiencing the state of immurement.
Eventually, in an attempt to dress before the rendezvous with the other, now officially proclaimed as the enemy, the protagonist loses his Ego and becomes a detail in the historical landscape. Somewhere within, a palm-tree (the primary phantasm) dies, but the protagonist survives. In the end, sorrow comes back to the reality. The protagonist now knows, whom he lost during the siege. But what remains open? The refusal to kill the thing-in-itself, and reunification with it in a non-conscious phantasm, plunges him into a tacit spasm about the lost object.