Under the ironic title “Normal Day”, our film shows the patient’s attempt to maintain a fragile day-to-day balance between work and friends, MRI scans, chemotherapy, and doctor’s appointments. Nataliya is a dancer, and after mastectomy her body, presented as something sacred, is not the same anymore. The movie reflects the mourning of her loss, while celebrating her will to survive.
One of the key themes of the film, as the title suggests, is the notion of normality and how it is perceived in our society. On the one hand, modern times encourage transparency as we try to shed the taboos on certain aspects of life; on the other hand, the movie presents the struggle of Nataliya to behave within a social frame that urges us to always act and react ‘normally’ in public, no matter how one really feels, to avoid confusion or disturbance, a phenomenon that is particularly glaring on traditional and social media, where people are expected to always present their best self. The film portrays how normality can be often misunderstood and misinterpreted.
The other key theme mentioned before, the conveyance of empathy, is being investigated in the form of a behavioural experiment; Nataliya holds her hand out towards the viewer and waits – will the viewer reach out their hand to touch it? If yes, the moderator would physically touch their hand in order to resume the film. Using a capacitive sensor, the film will only continue as long as the hands are touching, immersing the viewer in a deeply personal experience and introducing the sense of touch in an era when fully fledged haptic technology was not readily available on VR.