Aug 9, 2023 4:04am PT
Soviet-Era Kung Fu Comedy ‘The Invisible Fight’ Boarded by LevelK Ahead of Locarno Premiere (EXCLUSIVE)
By Christopher Vourlias, Marta Balaga
Courtesy of Gabriele Urm
LevelK has boarded “The Invisible Fight,” Estonian director Rainer Sarnet’s kung fu comedy set in an Orthodox monastery in the former Soviet Union. The film world premieres Aug. 11 in the main competition of the Locarno Film Festival.
“The Invisible Fight” is set in 1973 on the Soviet-Chinese border, where Private Rafael is on guard duty when his border post is attacked by a band of Chinese warriors schooled in the ancient art of kung fu. The only one to miraculously survive, Rafael, is fascinated by the long-haired, black-clad, kung fu hippies flying through the treetops while blasting forbidden Black Sabbath music from their portable radio. He’s suddenly struck by a revelation: he, too, wants to become a kung fu warrior.
Faith leads Rafael to an Orthodox monastery where the black-clad monks do their training, but his road to achieving the almighty power of humility required is long, winding and full of adventures.
Speaking to Variety ahead of the film’s premiere, Sarnet said that kung fu mythology and the rules of an Orthodox monastery made for a perfect fit.
“In these films, a master always teaches an apprentice, who is too rash and makes mistakes. In a monastery, every young monk has a ‘staret’: an older, more experienced monk leading him,” he said. “I visited several monasteries and they reminded me of some fairytale world: there are gardens and flowerbeds, with birds hopping about, and monks with long beards, clad in black robes like hobbits. For them, the invisible world is real. ‘Orthodoxy is cool,’ a monk once said to me. I think so, too.”
The director noted that both kung fu and religion were forbidden during the Soviet era, making them all the more attractive to his young initiate. “These forbidden fruits are sweet, and that’s why he turns to them,” Sarnet said. “They affect his heart and his body.”
The ’70s setting also appealed to the Estonian filmmaker. “I love 1970s cinema and all the heavyweights: Fassbinder, Pasolini, Tarkovsky, Buñuel. There was this ambition to be completely unique in art, which isn’t the case today,” he said. “Even exploitation films [from that time] felt fresh. They reached me later, in the 1990s, just like Tarkovsky. And I loved both.”
Sarnet is attracted to “infantile kind of humor,” which he mines even in the film’s explosive fight scenes, including one which features dumplings.
“I stole the dumpling idea from ‘Dance of the Drunk Mantis.’ It’s funny, but catching a dumpling without squashing it requires strength and tenderness. Engaging and guiding all corporal senses is essential in Orthodox practice, as well as in kung fu,” he said. “This kind of humor, it was essential. Child’s state is important in Christianity and our relationship with God is like the one we have with our parents. We are always forgiven.
“It was our intention to have this childishness reflected in the protagonist’s face. If a guy with a too masculine look was to act silly like that, his deeds would feel brutal,” Sarnet said. “Instead, we tried to incorporate the moves of the Wolf from the Soviet animation series ‘Well, You Just Wait!,’ where he always bullies the Rabbit. It’s the Wolf who knows that God has plans for him and he really believes in it. That’s what Rafael was based on.”
“The Invisible Fight” is set in an Orthodox monastery in the 1970s Soviet Union.
Courtesy of Gabriela Urm
“The Invisible Fight” stars Ursel Tilk (“Melchior the Apothecary. The Ghost”) as the kung fu fighter searching for enlightenment. He’s joined by Ester Kuntu (“Truth and Justice”), Kaarel Pogga (“Taevatrepp”) and Indrek Sammul (“Kalev”), as well as professional martial artists Eddie Tsai (“American Girl”), who was also the fight choreographer on the film, and Kyro Wavebourne (“Bullet Train”) and Johnny Wang (“The Blacklist”).
The film is produced by Katrin Kissa for Homeless Bob Production and co-produced by Alise Gelze of White Picture, Amanda Livanou of Neda Film and Helen Vinogradov of Helsinki-filmi. The film is produced with financial support from the Estonian Film Institute, Eurimages, the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, the Estonian Ministry of Culture, the National Film Center of Latvia, the Finnish Film Foundation, the Riga Film Fund, the Creative Europe MEDIA program, ERT SA, FLAG Co.Ltd, Tallifornia and ERR. It is a co-production between Estonia, Latvia, Greece and Finland.
“The Invisible Fight” is Sarnet’s fifth feature and reunites him with his award-winning DP Mart Taniel, who won the cinematography prize in Tribeca in 2018 for “November,” which was also named best Estonian film at the Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn. Other below-the-line talent include editor Jussi Rautaniemi, who has worked on titles including Cannes prize winners “Compartment No. 6” and “The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki,” with music provided by the Osaka-based guitarist and drummer Hino Koshiro, frontman for the rhythm-driven Japanese music collective Goat.
Despite the genre conventions he explores in “The Invisible Fight,” Sarnet insists, “I don’t think of myself as a genre director.”
“I studied kung fu films, but we didn’t have the means, or interest, in making a ‘pure’ kung fu film,” he said. “In genre films, the audience’s emotions are clearly defined: people must experience fear while watching a horror, they need to be thrilled watching a thriller or laugh at comedies. Achieving genre purity is not important to me. It’s more essential to have a pure heart.”
The Locarno Film Festival runs Aug. 2 – 12.
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