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| Satisfaction |
Director Alex Burunova's psychological thriller, Satisfaction, divides its time between present-day Greece, where composer Philip (Fionn Whitehead) is working on a new album, and London two years prior, where his romance with Lola (Emma Laird), also a composer, first blossomed. Unlike Philip, Lola's musical voice has faded and there's a noticeable rift in their relationship. When Lola encounters Elena (Zar Amir) on a nudist beach, she's immediately drawn to her magnetic spirit. This encounter will not only stoke Philip's insecurity, but will push Lola into a transformative confrontation with herself.
With a background in painting and theatre, Burunova's film credits include the 2019 Netflix original documentary Enter The Anime, which follows the director's own introduction to the form.
In conversation with Eye For Film, Burunova discussed the sensitive subject of trauma, challenging preconceptions and the immersive preparation behind Satisfaction's improvisation.
Paul Risker: What compelled you to want to take this sensitive subject and tell this story now?
Alex Burunova: This is a very personal story to me that grabbed hold of me 10 years ago and wouldn't let go. In a way, it chose me. I didn't choose it. Without giving away any spoilers, I wanted to take a very painful event in my life and write it down as a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, so I could look at it from the different perspectives of each character, and even the place where it's set, to really try to figure out what it means and what the lesson is. At the deepest level, it's a story about healing pain and healing trauma. The idea is not to erase it but to be able to embrace it fully and look it in the eye.
Paul Risker : Trauma is something we are still struggling to understand and embrace, especially the different types of traumas and responses. Satisfaction immerses us in this urgent conversation and forces us to confront a deeply unsettling subject.
AB: You're absolutely right and what's interesting is everybody has a very different response to trauma. Sometimes those responses are very counter-intuitive. They're almost illogical, like Stockholm syndrome, where people fall in love with their captor, for example. There is fight, flight, freeze or fawn — they've added another one to the potential list of trauma responses.
So, we each process it differently, and sometimes we do it at the expense of ourselves. There is self-erasure that happens when we don't want to face it, when we don't want to believe that it happened to us, or we don't want to feel like a victim.
A timely thing is, we don't want to feel like victims of anything, and so, our brain rewires these narratives about what happened and about ourselves. Sometimes this denial can shape our identity in ways we don't even understand, and subconsciously in the background while we're doing other things. I'm interested in human psychology, and I'm interested in the counterintuitive ways we handle things.
PR: With Satisfaction, you never try to over-explain. Instead, it's about listening to Lola and trying to understand her based on what she's willing to share.
AB: Yes, the coolest thing about cinema and films that I like is when they're not over explained and things are left unsaid — where you can transpose your own human experience onto the film you're watching. Each audience member can have their own journey, but you need to leave space for that. So, I tried to do that a little bit.
PR: Watching Satisfaction, I was reminded of Charlotte Wells' Aftersun and Sean Baker's Anora. In both cases, the hype seemed inexplicable until a moment when the intention burst forth. Satisfaction has this same quality, but it requires the director to trust the audience, and for the audience to be patient, allowing the director to reveal the film so late on.
AB: Yes, I also love that kind of storytelling. It's also about setting up certain expectations or playing with certain stereotypes. You think you're watching one story and in Satisfaction, you see this helpless woman who's lost and has a doting boyfriend who's trying to help her. That's a stereotype we've seen many times before — a woman who is lost, who doesn't know what to do, and a man who's there to save her. As the story progresses, it flips on its head, and you learn that things are not what they seem. Then, you get to check yourself and how you think about those stereotypes — what you might think about a woman like that and her boyfriend. It's then that you rediscover your own preconceptions.
PR: Day-to-day, there's often a reluctance to challenge these preconceptions. Satisfaction is a type of self-reflective confrontation with ourselves that allows us to scrutinise how compassionate and empathetic we are.
AB: Absolutely, and as you get to know someone, you gain a deeper understanding of why they're a certain way. Instead of judging certain traits, you start loving them because you understand why they're that way. For example, why they're maybe a little bit guarded, and you appreciate it more.
I guess it's a branch of storytelling that kind of does that and has a very natural relationship with the audience. Instead of feeding them everything right off the bat, it's about discovering this character and discovering how you feel about them. And the more you learn about them, you discover how that feeling changes.
PR: Amid this journey of discovery, I'd describe the film as being the end of the beginning of a larger story.
AB: The film deals with a very formative event. When painful things happen, when trauma happens, we can choose to grow because of it or in spite of it. So, we can choose our own reaction to what happens.
The film was a process because it wasn't written that way ten years ago in the beginning. But it ended up being about how this woman became who she is in spite of what happened to her or because of it, and how she was able to take pain and transmute it into a stronger self. She reclaims her voice in a stronger way as both a woman and an artist, and maybe she becomes a stronger artist than she would otherwise have been.
PR: Satisfaction's cinematography is striking. It can be cold and confrontational but also sad and intimate. Did coming from a painting and theatre background influence the film's aesthetic?
AB: I have a background in painting and I went to art school for six years. Once I had a screenplay, about five years before we shot the film, I started painting the film's keyframes and storyboards in watercolour. They're very monochromatic, and they had a certain look because I wanted to dial into the visual world of the film — that's very important. I can talk about it for hours; I can geek out on that.
I met my cinematographer [Máté Herbai] four years before I had anything — before I had any actors or producers on board. I started talking to him about this film and how I saw it. We've worked on it extensively and when it comes to the visual world of the film, I wanted to make sure there is a big juxtaposition between present-day Greece and the beginning of the story two years prior in London, when these characters are just getting to know each other and their love is blossoming.
In Greece, we chose a limited monochromatic palette, and we wanted to make sure it had a vastness because the Greek islands have these vast seascapes and landscapes that feel very grand, but they can also be isolating. I wanted my characters to get lost in these seascapes and landscapes.
Then, for the architecture, I wanted it to look like a cage. We had a strong linear motif in the film with horizontal and vertical lines in almost every shot, whether with the architecture or production design. In the London scenes, we wanted to go against that. We tried to use circular motifs and a really rich color palette, also with secondary colours, and wild and unpredictable camera movements — handheld, no shot list, just chaotic, like the way it feels to be in your twenties.
That was the visual world of the film and, coming from writing and directing theatre for over a decade, I wanted to approach it like a theatre play. We started rehearsing with Emma Laird, who plays Lola, six months before we shot. I'm a big believer in extensive rehearsals and very immersive preparation. We were working on formative memories and first memories, subconscious processes and thoughts. Emma met with composers, and she had weekly piano sessions with a coach to immerse her in that practice, so she could feel like this was her life. Then Fionn Whitehead, who played Philip, stayed in the same Airbnb during prep with Emma. They were constantly in character together, creating these memories. They would cook in character, and they would hang out in character. Sometimes they would have unannounced guests, which would be actors and characters showing up as their friends to hang out.
I wanted them to build the characters from the ground up with memories. I call these roots, so they can really immerse themselves in those characters and have a feel for them from their earliest years, from their childhood. Then, when we got on set, we could throw away the script and improvise, and they could speak from the heart. This extensive preparation allowed me to trust that they really got these characters. A lot of it was improvised and a lot of what they're saying was not scripted.
Satisfaction had its World Première at the 2025 SXSW Film Festival, in Austin, Texas.
