Swedish tragicomedy in Zoom — an intimate portrait of human feelings in self-isolation
Eleven characters - Swedish middle-class representatives - are locked in their homes amid the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. A dying mother persuades her son to make peace with his brother. A pregnant woman finds love. An abandoned husband is trying to cheer himself up. A couple of influencers come up with content ideas from self-isolation. A therapist supports the client, although he is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A daughter begins to become strongly attached to her mother. Their very different fates closely intertwine thanks to the only remaining way of communicating with each other - via video communication. Unusual for a conversational drama name Orca, when translated from Latin, refers to the killer whale, a gregarious mammal that cannot live in isolation from other representatives of its species. Swedish director Josefine Bornebusch transfers this phenomenon to people, painting our collective portrait in conditions of social distancing with a bittersweet smile and a feeling of total melancholy. An endless cycle of Zoom-chats, in which the main characters communicate throughout the film, colorfully reveals the feelings that overwhelm when already weak human connections slowly disintegrate into pixels and glitches on laptop screens. Bornebusch wrote the script in three weeks while in quarantine - the same amount of time was spent on filming at home.
Original language: Swedish Subtitles: Belarusian | English