The story of this surreal short follows a fisherman’s fatal encounter with two macabre yet whimsical creatures who lure him into their world and bring him face to face with his fate. FATAL THINGS is a deeply personal work for Luna Go, the creator of the film and the designer of the creatures’ costumes. Inspired by the Slavic fairy tales and their occasionally grisly characters which inhabited Luna’s childhood, the film is filled with vivid imagery which could be called gory and graphic were it not so surreal. The creatures are based on the Sirin Bird: half-woman, half-bird who accompanied dying soldiers from the battlefield to the Paradise garden, and the slavic version of Mermaids: drowned women who came back to life and lured men into lakes, enchanting and then drowning them. The film, although playful and campy at first sight, is inseparable from the grim horror of the war in Ukraine. FATAL THINGS is laced with anatomical, “bodily,” imagery, connecting violence with vulnerability. Luna says: “I didn’t just grow up with these fairytales: the fairytales grew into me, sprouting in my body, with their roots winding all the way around my bones. I couldn’t tear them out of me if I wanted to; and now, faced with the monstrosity of the war, I often want to do just that - tear out all memory of Moscow and of Kyiv, the places of my childhood, and blissfully forget that I am a part of this conflict too. But I can’t forget, nor should I. Instead I wish to remember the fairytales that I am made of, and let them come to life in their erratic, gory glory.”