Sleepless Beauty

Would you be able to never sleep if you were kidnapped? Because only then can you perhaps survive … UCM.ONE is releasing the new masterpiece by director Pavel Khvaleev on the film label “M-Square Pictures“. The film “Sleepless Beauty“, which has already been shown at many festivals such as Sitges, Imagine, Dead by Night, Obscura Berlin and Bastalavista, is as disturbing as it is fascinating. A visually stunning and shocking roller coaster ride for all horror fans!

Synopsis

“Sleepless Beauty” tells the cruel story of a young teacher, Mila, who is kidnapped by a mysterious organization called Recreation and locked up in an almost empty room. Her unknown kidnappers communicate with her only through a loudspeaker and set strict rules: she is not allowed to sleep and has to perform bizarre and brutal tasks if she wants to stay alive. At first it looks like all this is intended to entertain some perverts, but as the assignments get tougher and tougher, Mila begins to realize that she is losing control of her own mind and may actually be the guinea pig in a perverse and life-threatening psychological experiment.

About Pavel Khvaleev

Pavel Khvaleev was born in Naberezhnie Chelni, Russia, in 1984. He started producing music when he was only 15 years old. In 2004 he founded the music project Moonbeam together with his brother Vitaly. During the following years Moonbeam became a famous international act in the world wide electronic dance scene, entering DJ Magazine‘s annual list of the world’s best DJs TOP 100 in the year 2000. All 40 official Moonbeam music video clips were directed by Pavel, many of them were shown at international film festivals such as Berlin Independent Film Festival, Shockfest Film Festival or Venice Film Festival. In 2012 Pavel Khvaleev debuted with his first full-length feature film as the director of the movie “The Random“. 2013 Pavel and his team of only 8 people started the creation of his second feature film called „III – The Ritual“ with a budget of only € 30,000. The film was selected for official screenings in more then 22 international film festivals in 2015 and won many awards. In 2018 Pavel Khvaleev released this third feature film, „Involution“, and in 2020 he finished his horror feature film „Sleepless Beauty”.

Director’s statement by Pavel Khvaleev

“It is perfectly clear to everyone that contemporary society has crossed the red line of impunity and the borders between the do’s and don’ts ceased to exist long ago for a certain social unit – those who selected the dark side of the Internet. If you watch “Sleepless Beauty” film, you’ll have a chance to observe an allusion for a sacrifice, which shows how consciousness of a virgin girl was used and then destroyed in favor of a very subtle weapon from the psychological point of view. By design, due to intervention into the brain division responsible for face recognition, the identification process is disturbed and the visible image for the examinee is fully replaced. We decided to create this story when learned about one medical case, which occurred in October 2012, when a patient saw completely different face features of the doctor due to irritation of some temporal lobe zones.

But in this story, the surgical operation itself is not so important as its background. For the physical intervention the personality shall be fully devastated and consciousness should be able to accept a new image instead of the former one. Only then the substitution process will be completed successfully. Dramatics of this situation lies in the fact that the selected sacrifice dies by the most loved one’s hand. This is a superweapon of our age. The videos demonstrated to the main lady character during the entire confinement period were carefully selected. They include fully assembled and animated images of body pieces, photo inserts, animal parts and many other things obtained just from the Internet space. The author of this work is Yakov Ivanusa, a Ukrainian artist. Working on the musical part I wished the audience feel a real anxiety. Each sound underlines the condition of strain and hopelessness experienced by the main lady character. As a whole, the movie concept shoes that everyone may turn out to be a lamb on the sacrificial table of the today technologies.