It wasn’t broken. It was possessed. By a fly.

April 13, 2026

The film’s origin is as organic as its protagonist. Vrbová, a documentarian known for her meditative studies of decaying industrial sites, had been awarded a residency at the abandoned Barrandov Studio Annex in Prague. The Annex, a ghostly cathedral of peeling paint and broken chairs, had been home to Czech New Wave classics in the 1960s before falling into disrepair.

The insect, drawn to the warmth of the lens and the faint scent of the operator’s discarded jam sandwich, had landed on the camera’s winding knob. Its frantic, chaotic movements—cleaning its legs, pivoting to escape a spider’s web, chasing a mote of dust—had actually advanced the film and depressed the shutter release via a series of micro-tremors. The fly, in its panicked navigation of the machinery, had become the cinematographer, director, and sole performer of its own accidental epic.

“The irony is that I became its servant,” she admits. “I would arrive each morning, and Ferda would be waiting on the Bolex. It wasn’t directing him. He was directing me. I’d see that he had knocked the camera over, or that he had dragged a piece of lint across the lens as a kind of filter. My job was simply to reload the magazine and wind the spring.”