Experiencing Interruptions?

The House of Asterion

A doctor visits an ancient castel with the intention to save a hermit imprisoned there surrounded by high walls and possessed by mental illness.
The castel is actually an unwelcoming labyrinth with magic powers controlled by its owner. As a thinking organism the castel reject the doctor and creates mortal traps to stop him. The obstacles the doctor is going through desperately attempting to survive, are not just material, a sort of spell is affecting the doctor’s mind and the whole environment.
Reality and illusion start to merge, the doctor perceives his antagonist’s words, his endless monologue and his bestial behaviour, he begins to sympathise with his patient.
The prisoner is moving slowly into the parallel universe of the labyrinth, he is carrying a mask to hide and protect himself from his own insanity, he speaks with his visions and finally realises that the only way to escape the labyrinth in which the echo of sufferance is destroying him, is to get caught by the doctor.
He capitulates and resolve the gordian knot of the labyrinth.
Absurdly as the doctor comes closer to the patient he sees things in a differs way. To be ill is apparently becoming just a matter of detail and prospective: he accept his destiny to kill and release the prisoner.

  • Juri Händelsson
    Director
  • Daniela Lama
    Director
  • Juri Händelsson
    Writer
  • Daniela Lama
    Writer
  • Juri Händelsson
    Producer
  • Ayla Sophia Franken
    Producer
  • Daniela Lama
    Producer
  • Marco Vertucci
    Producer
  • Alessio Ferrara
    Key Cast
    "Doctor & Patient"
  • Sara Karina
    Key Cast
    "Doctor"
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    La Casa di Asterion
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short, Student
  • Runtime:
    13 minutes 20 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    November 30, 2018
  • Production Budget:
    1,000 EUR
  • Country of Origin:
    Italy
  • Country of Filming:
    Italy
  • Language:
    Italian
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    Yes
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography - Juri Händelsson, Daniela Lama

Born in 1983, Juri Händelsson grew up on a small island in gulf of Naples in the south of Italy. He studied political science and philosophy achieving a master degrees in Political philosophy.
At the age of 26 he moved to Berlin with the goal of expressing himself as a Film Director, working independently and in many different productions.
Currently he's studying at the FilmArche, the biggest self organised film school in Europe and he's working in his own production company "DUKAproduction".

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

Cinema and philosophy are both activity generated by the act of thinking, the first express itself in images the second in concepts. This is a work of aesthetics that, inspired by one of the most cinematographic work of literature written by Jorge Luis Borges, investigate the nature of a greek tragedy, which mutatis mutandis is the tragedy of our contemporary western culture.
The drama, lyrically expressed in form of a monologue that goes deep into roots of greek mythology, is a profound exploration of a contemporary divided human soul. The transposition in the movie of the union between a patient and a doctor, is the central idea that represent the scission between body and soul. An intersection of duality of an imprisoned and separated ego, as jungian metal-level of an ego that believes to be the owner of the psyche with all possibility to choose a destiny for himself, but in fact no real ones in front of the Fate, represented by the immutability of its own nature provided with proper visions, possibly related to a non individualistic subconscious.
In the movie there is on one side the introspective analysis of a timeless high cultivated men who has lost the perception of himself and doesn’t now anymore if he is a thinker, an ascetic, an eremite, a king, an illiterate or a prisoner. On the other side there is the interpretation of a beast (the Minotaur) as a childish innocent creature not conscious as well of his nature, who thinks of the victims that are coming in his labyrinth in form of a tribute to feed him, as friends that just came to visit him.
Furthermore there are the redeemer and the labyrinth itself, in the picture are the doctor projected in a surreal environment searching for evil sickness, finding nothing else but himself. A metaphor of the human being efforts always pointed to search outside the reasons of our malaises.
The overturning of an heroic mythology in which in reality the beast wasn’t beat at all but surrender in front of an astonished Theseus who had to admit the truth to another doctor (Ariadne) and close the scenario identifying in the plot himself with the victim, probably because destroyed by the sense of guilt: the last of the psychological stratagem of the ego-narcissist with the aim of changing the angle of the interpretation