From the Film Maker...

I was intrigued by the painting's ambiguity and its layers of meaning. On the surface, the painting was beautiful, colourful, magical. I tried to incorporate this into the film through the composition of shots, colour and the title sequences. Yet on closer inspection, I noticed little pockets of ugliness, dark and frightening aspects that nestled in this captivating mythological world.

Using these aspects, I developed the themes of love, desire, fraud, jealousy, deceit and the relentlessness of time. I started to look at the theme of how beauty and ugliness can exist in such close proximity. I looked at the work of the director David Lynch.

The colours in the painting were very important to me. Venus and Cupid embrace in front of a large piece of blue fabric. I used this blue for the fence that separates Hannah, the main character, from the lovers in the film. I allocated each character a colour: red for Daniel (Cupid), emblematic of love, but also of blood and danger. And pink for Lily - a bright pink, like the cushion in the left hand corner of the painting.

The bird that Daniel shoots is white, like the dove in the painting, symbolic of purity and also love. While the dove in the painting is alive, the dove in the film is dead, representing the futility of Hannah's struggle for love and the impossibility of her achieving it.

I made cupid into a modern day boy next door, Daniel, who shoots a crossbow instead of a bow and arrow. Hannah was inspired by the figure of Deceit; Hannah offers her love as Deceit offers her gift of honeycomb. Lily is based on Venus who becomes the equivalent of a high school beauty queen. She symbolically holds the coveted golden apple in the form of Daniel's attention, her prize for being the most beautiful.

The story is an exploration of how rejection and jealousy can lead to cruelty and brutality
Sasha Collington