From the Film Maker...

The inspiration came from the expressions of the characters and the rich colours as well as the multitude of items surrounding them.

There is money portrayed in the painting and a sense of both greed and misery, but in a funny way. The quest for perceived social status and giving too much importance to things is what made me remember the Anton Chekhov story that I adapted into my film.

Both subjects in the painting are grotesque faces that appear grotesquely harassed. Their expressions, more than anything else, drew me to the painting: they seem to be in physical pain while looking very funny.

The hope was for a film with a certain amount of character and the painting reflected that character perfectly. It gave me feelings of mirth but also the characters seemed shallow and possessed by material things. The more I looked at it, the more I felt sad for them and wanted to make fun of them in equal amounts. In a nutshell, they made me want to tell a story about uncomfortably familiar fears and situations taken to a hilarious extreme, as only Chekhov could have perceived.
Antonis Voutsinos