Available to watch online for free from 5th Jan, 2020. ‘Epizoda ?’ was previously hosted by the wonderful Tao Films art movie platform, which is currently taking a creative pause. Please join their group for updates: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1301242193272965/
Epizoda ? was produced at Béla Tarr’s film.factory in Sarajevo. The program’s graduates, including members of the Epizoda ? crew, now form an artistic collective: www.bistrikseven.com/
Starring Elma Selman & Vladimir Kajević.
Written, Directed & Edited by Graeme Cole.
Art Direction by Aleksandra Niemczyk.
Music by Dino Santaleza.
More info on Epizoda ? —
http://zoomcitta.blogspot.co.uk/p/epizoda.html
and here:
http://zoomcitta.blogspot.com/2016/11/recontres-bandits-mages-program-notes.html
You may recall – and it doesn’t matter if you don’t – that midway through 2011 there was talk of the Institute remaking a lost police procedural, a detective show without a name that was stumbled upon during a routine search of our archives. The tape was a complete mystery: no opening or closing credits, the ad break paused-out and nothing but snow before and after the main recording. No-one recognised the handwriting on the box, which detailed only an address which the Post Office were unable to verify ever having existed. I was appointed to direct and produce the remake, and began to put together a production team and recce the area around the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry. Castlefield was agreed upon as the most similar-looking location to that on the videotape, which locality nobody had been able to identify. The police procedural appeared to be a solitary episode from a long-running, mainstream TV series, so we tentatively named the remake Episode ?. Due to the unrelated rumours so cruelly spread regarding the Institute’s working practices, in 2013 I left the UK for Bosnia and Herzegovina, and I took the whole damn project with me. We recast with local talent and somehow Sarajevo stood in for Manchester, or wherever on earth the original was filmed.
The show, it seems, was in a 38-minute episode, murder-a-week format, revolving around the curious figure of Detective Inspector Colin Giffard, a provincial British homicide cop completely out of his depth and plagued by emotional issues that he fails to conceal from his colleagues. It is not a comedy. Giffard’s incompetence is tolerated by his sultry, sixty-something boss, but apparently not by his partners: near the beginning of Epizoda ?, he is teamed with a rookie, Tereza Nemec, the subtext being that anyone in the district who knew better would avoid the gig. The tape begins with Nemec turning up at a factory where Giffard is assessing a murder scene. The impression on both Nemec and the first-time viewer is that Giffard may be some sort of troubled genius or idiot savant, but Nemec soon begins to realise that Giffard is not the same as other detectives.
And Epizoda ?’s source is not the same as other detective shows. But it shares the same corrupt DNA, its structure further corrupted by time, incompatibility issues and undercurrents of the inevitable downfall of civilisation.
