Where to Watch MacGuffin (2021)

Summary

In March 2020, the film's auteur, Anar Azimov, found himself trapped in a foreign city under COVID-19 lockdown, and his film project was canceled due to the quarantine. Using his smartphone, he decided to make a docufiction about his situation. Documentary videos the film consists of are spontaneous. They mostly depict things rather than people, which stresses the quarantine realities with social life almost non-existent. The voice-over narration is mostly documentary as well. The narrator-protagonist is fictional, but his circumstances are mostly the same as the auteur's, and his voice belongs to the auteur himself. "MacGuffin" is a famous cinema term invented by Alfred Hitchcock to define something non-existent in the story for the characters to search for to lure the audience's attention. The protagonist himself recognizes he's searching for his wife in a city she's far away from. Yet the true MacGuffin is the very protagonist. He's searching for himself, for his creative and romantic identity - and eventually finds he no more exists. The story is told by the protagonist as the voice-over. It's visualised as a sequence of smartphone videos. The sequence is rather associative or emotional than purely logical. For example, when the narrator mentions "Hitchcock-suspense", the camera shows a staircase, its shadow on the wall, leading into darkness; repeated meaningless statements are visualised as playing the street-organ etc. The smartphone is the best option as a camera for this story: as the protagonist tells his story as a voice-over, we trace his mind, or his memory, through spontaneous videos he made. Spontaneity has demanded refusal from any external accessories such as stabilisers or lenses. This is for the "documentary" part of the film's genre. However, there's also a "fiction" part, which has demanded the following solutions . The only sound in the film is the narrator's voice. I did consider using some other sounds to illustrate the shots, but have finally decided to avoid it to provide for the feeling of the narrator-protagonist's disconnection from the world. I've used slo-mo, reverse effect etc. to demonstrate whatever we see on the screen is rather a transformation of the reality in the narrator's mind than the reality itself.