Sofia International Film Festival

Let’s start with your character, Oded, who at one point began to question his everyday life...

One
of the things I love the most about cinema is that sometimes the most
mundane things, if you stare at them long enough, start to look unusual.
If we look deep enough at a regular chair, for example, at some point
it startsto seem like something completely unknown... If we start gazing
at things, in a moment we begin to ask questions: “What is a car?” – “A
big box with four wheels which people enter and then go out”... So,
sometimes the most banal and rational things become irrational. For me
the irrational is not in the dark and unlit corners, in strange music
and aliens. I think the very fact that we have houses and cars and
roads, is strange and disturbing enough to begin with... As in Kafka –
we begin to think that just going to the neighboring village is
dangerous for us, that crossing the road is impossible. And my film is
imbued with this feeling of insecurity that a staring man experiences,
the man who dismantles the structures of everyday life...

Kafka
is a good comparison, on many levels. The characters in your film also
have this inner stiffness as Kafka’s protagonists...

Yes,
the man becomes an object. At some point you realize you are just put
somewhere: you do not use roads but they use you, you do not use stairs
but they use you. You are fully aware that man is not the master of the
world around him but the world uses him.

The film is extremely different from the atmosphere in The Band’s Visit, but at the same time, your manner can not be mistaken...

For
me there has never been quite such a difference between the two films,
because the language of cinema is ultimately the same, but, yes, as an
atmosphere The Band’s Visit is an optimistic film which looks for human interaction, while the The Exchange
is a film about the states of estrangement when people cease to
understand the other people and the world. May be at first glance it
seems like changing of the angle or style, but such is the life itself –
sometimes you feel full of love to the world and people, but sometimes
you just do not want to have anything to do with them.

Read the whole interview with Earn Kolirin on SIFF's website.