Witch hammer

In 2024, a friend and I decided to make a little video for our social media accounts. Simple, beautiful and stylish. I started throwing around ideas, writing a script, looking for references - keeping in my head the main commandment of all aspiring filmmakers - shoot about what hurts. Well, what hurts is what hurts, and it hurts a lot of places and from what.
This movie/clip/art video performance is called Malleus Maleficārum. Witches' Hammer. It's a book written by a not quite healthy man in the 15th century about the methods of persecuting witches. It's also a treatise on demonology. A dark history of humanity, a dark history of faith. Thousands of broken lives. I've always been concerned with the issue of “witch hunts” as one of the most horrific things that happened to people, out of “good” motives.
And when I started writing the script, I realized that I couldn't stay within one timeline. Because times change. And the problems remain. Just like the innocent, the weak and the defenseless are labeled and hunted. Yes. They don't burn people at the stake now. But constant insults, bullying, internet harassment - breaks people's lives no worse than an inquisitorial snare. And that's why I combined the idea of “Witch Hunt” and modern, more often even, school bullying.
The main idea is the inevitability of punishment for any atrocity. The heroine of the movie finds herself in the grip of hatred and cruelty. She asks for help from the higher powers. Having received help, she cruelly kills her offenders, but at the same time she becomes evil herself. And she herself deserves a commensurate punishment.
In our art-house clip we combined time frames - in one frame we have peasants with pitchforks and ordinary, modern people with phones. A huge bonfire of the Inquisition and TV sets. References to religious texts and hashtags “#burnthewitch” on smartphones.
Overall. The art video “Malleus Maleficārum” is a saying, a thought, a parable for one and all. About the fact that any evil will be punished.