Paris-based sales agency Inwave Films has secured international rights to director Larissa Petrova’s second feature film, Lust. The film will have its world premiere in the Forum section of the Berlin Film Festival from February 12th to 22nd.
Petrova’s debut feature Godless premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2016, winning the Golden Leopard Award for Best Picture, and went on to win 27 more awards and was nominated for the European Film Academy’s European Discovery Award.
“Lust” follows Lillian, a parole officer whose life is governed by clinical precision: her body, emotions, and desires are tightly controlled. When she is called back to her hometown to solve the death of her absent father, what should be a brief administrative detour unravels into unresolved debts, institutional inertia, and a rotting corpse left in bureaucratic limbo.
Moving through offices, hotel rooms, and abandoned residences, “Lust” depicts “a descent into proximity, with grief, flesh, and long-numbed desire.” An uneasy connection with a shibari rigger (a person who engages in a type of bondage using ropes) offers “a controlled practice of vulnerability that negotiates rather than promises intimacy.”
A statement said: “With strict restraint and unsettling tenderness, ‘The Last’ explores the fragile line between authority and surrender, asking what remains when control is no longer sufficient.”
“My father passed away in 2016, a man I hardly knew,” Petrova said. “What followed was not an ordinary sadness, but a lament for an absence that was already present. ‘Desire’ emerged from this space as a way of framing what was missing and how it would remain. In this film, I felt the emptiness left by an absent father and how a daughter carries that weight. Conceived as a midlife psychodrama, “Desire” moves between mystery, fantasy, and ghost story, but rather than solving absence, it traces how it destabilizes and sometimes creates gaps in control.”
“Through a strict female gaze, Laritza transforms a familiar story of desire and trauma into a precise psychodrama in which the erotic tension is inseparable from a woman’s attempts to reclaim her body,” commented InWave Film founders Shuein Li and Yushuan Zhang. “Her treatment pushes the film far beyond its genre confines, into something quietly ritualistic and existential, reflecting the spiritual undercurrents that run through her oeuvre. We were struck by the way she deals with absence: a missing father, a disowned body, a need for control, and an undercurrent. In a landscape where depictions of sexuality are still too often framed from the outside, Lust feels unusual, inviting viewers into the same uneasy intimacy from within.”
Lust was produced by Petrova for Bulgaria’s Aporia Filmworks in collaboration with Poli Angelova and Nikolai Todotov for Bulgaria’s Screening Emotions. It is co-produced by Denmark’s Snowglobe and Sweden’s Silver Film, with support from the Bulgarian National Film Center, the Danish Film Institute, Film i Vast and Yuri Images.
