They decided to film their love story in quarantine. They love each other provocatively and sensually until something unexpected happens. The passion they shared fades, both inside and outside the frame. Within the confines of four walls, something has been lost, but it's impossible to name or heal.
The end of a relationship told through an ever-present camera, without shame or censorship.
What is love?
Riccardo is a passionate and restless reporter. Kata is a porn actress, genuinely romantic and confident. They fell in love in Sri Lanka, where they ran a PornHub channel together while traveling the country.
When the 2020 pandemic began, they found themselves far from each other, stranded in two different parts of the world. After several months of separation, Riccardo managed to join Kata in her apartment in Budapest to spend the quarantine together and film their love again.
On the first night, she sets out fresh flowers and lit candles, and he turns on the camera. They're both excited and impatient. They want everything to be perfect. However, their magical moment fades. When Riccardo admits to having sex with another woman, Kata is devastated. From then on, they do everything they can to break the deadlock. Thus, being confined to a one-bedroom apartment forces them to constantly confront each other.
Day after day, Riccardo begins to feel increasingly guilty and claustrophobic, and Kata finds forgiveness harder than expected. Even sex changes, going from an act of complicity and passion to a mechanical routine. Sometimes they left the camera on until the battery died.
Meanwhile, their characters collide in a vortex of incommunicability. Riccardo wants to take a break and leave, while Kata wants him to face the situation and stay. Neither is able to explain what has changed, but they begin to wonder if they ever knew each other. It's especially painful because, in the meantime, they're still capable of vivid moments of closeness.
Within a few weeks, all the stages of a relationship's end unfold within four walls. Until both accept that their love has faded and they can't get it back. The flowers withered and the candles went out.
Riccardo's ever-present camera tells their story without shame or censorship and with a pinch of truth, which perhaps wasn't entirely intentional.
Turning on the camera was a way to restart our love story after the abrupt interruption of the pandemic. From day one, however, we realized that the dynamic was different and that finding the same connection wasn't a given. And while at first I created carefully curated images while Kata organized small home settings, as time passed, the camera was simply on, fixed in focus, and the house became increasingly disorganized. We moved within the frame, forgetting we were being filmed, exhausting every last bit of energy from our relationship until its epilogue. When, several months after our separation, I returned to the material, it was disarming. I realized that those images carried a truth of their own that transcended both my version of the story and Katia's.
