Charlotte Vega as “Brana” in Ben Parker’s “BURIAL.”
tCourtesy of IFC Midnigh
You’ve probably heard the adage a billion times: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
The immortal words of George Santayana had never felt more relevant to Ben Parker than they did in 2016 when, like many of us, the filmmaker bore witness to a parade of White Supremacists marching through the streets of Charlottesville, tiki torches clutched in their hands as they shouted a hateful refrain — “Jews will not replace us!”
Fascist ideals were alive and well in the 21st century, proving for the umpteenth time that humans cannot (or will not) learn from the mistakes of their forebears. Sickened by what he saw, Parker wanted to add his voice to the cultural conversation.
“It was me being sick of people pointing to something and saying, ‘This is the thing to blame. And if you do this, if you build this, if you get out of this, everything will be great, and it’ll solve all your problems,’” the filmmaker tells me over Zoom, alluding to the authoritarian stratagems of scapegoating and… *ahem* wall construction. “Then when it gets down to it, it’s nothing but a bunch of lies and there’s nothing there. I wanted to point the finger in that direction, not-so-subtly.”
CHARLOTTESVILLE, USA – AUGUST 11: Peter Cvjetanovic (R) along with Neo Nazis, Alt-Right, and White … [+] Supremacists encircle and chant at counter protestors at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson after marching through the University of Virginia campus with torches in Charlottesville, Va., USA on August 11, 2017. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
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At the time, Parker (not to be confused with Spider-Man’s uncle) was tinkering with the script for a short film the director likens to a “a campfire tale,” in which a collection of Russian soldiers transport the corpse of Adolf Hitler back to Moscow in the turbulent aftermath of World War II. “That’s mostly what’s going on in my head when I’m writing any story: ‘Could I entertain someone around a campfire with this story? Could I entertain my friends? Could I entertain a listener?’”
While in the process of researching the life and career Andrey Vlasov (a Soviet military leader who collaborated with the Nazis) for the purposes of a different film, he came across the story of Elena Rzhevskaya, a Jewish NKVD intelligence officer tasked with verifying the remains of the Führer in the smoking ruins of Berlin, circa 1945.
“I thought, ‘Wow, that’s too much of an interesting story,’ especially if it was contested by the Soviet government [which said] ‘No, no, this didn’t happen. She never did this,’” Parker says. “And she swears that this is true. All that stuff was so interesting and I thought, ‘Well, can I make an entertaining thriller out of that?’”
The result was Burial. Set to be released by IFC Midnight this week, the taut, 95-minute period thriller stars Charlotte Vega (Warrior Nun) as Brana, the leading member of a classified mission sanctioned by Stalin himself to bring a priceless box back to the USSR through war-torn Poland.
***WARNING! The following contains minor spoilers for the film!***
This container is so valuable, in fact, that it must be buried every night, lest the “Werewolves” — a band of German partisans who refuse to accept that the war is lost — get their goose-stepping mitts on it. While these guerrilla fighters really did exist, their numbers and efficacy were highly exaggerated by the propaganda disseminated by Joseph Goebbels.
“I think you learn the rules and then you break the rules,” Parker explains. “I did the research and then I broke the research. I did as much research as I could to make sure that I wasn’t stepping too far out of the bounds of reality. But I knew that I was. I knew that the Werewolves were hugely over-mythologized for being a larger group than they were.”
While not an out-and-out horror flick, Burial does flirt with the genre (without veering into the pulpiness of, say, Julius Avery’s Overlord) when the Werewolves make use of naturally-occurring hallucinogenics to disorient their enemies.
“It was a horrific event scarred into our history, scarred into the minds of everybody who lived through it,” Parker says when why WWII is an ideal backdrop for horror elements. “You don’t want to get bogged down in exposition. If you’re doing a sci-fi [project] and a future war, you have to explain everything. With World War II, you’ve seen everything and you know how horrific it can be … It does stand as a really good storytelling device to show people, ‘Hey, look, this happened not so long ago — it can happen again if you’re not too careful. Here are the horrors that happened, don’t go down that path again.’ It’s good to tap into people’s psyches about that.”
‘Burial’ key art
Courtesy of IFC Midnight
Burial also leans into the grand cinematic tradition of soldiers-on-a-mission films like Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and, more importantly, Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen — the latter of which employed Parker’s grandfather as a technical advisor.
“What I love about those mission films, is that people just get picked off quite unceremoniously,” Parker says. “Telly Savalas and Jim Brown, they’re just dead, and then that’s it. We just carry on with the mission. There’s something quite horrific about these big stars just being killed off. That stuck with me. I tried to carry that on to the way that I shot [this] film and wrote the script.”
Given the severity of the overall assignment handed down to the Russian soldiers, you’d think they were carrying the Ark of the Covenant. However, the box’s contents are about as far as one can get from the two stone tablets Moses is said to have brought down from Mount Sinai in the earliest days of a people the Nazis would attempt to wipe off the face of the Earth. No — this package contains the rotting remains of a small and megalomaniacal psychopath responsible for the death of millions.
“Even dead, he’s still dangerous and every character that comes into contact with this corpse acts a different way, has a feeling about it,” Parker explains. “It’s not a box of treasure, it’s a box of evil. On set, everybody felt the same way. As soon as you open up that crate and there’s this horrible corpse inside, everybody felt horrible.”
Not wanting to glorify Hitler in any way, Parker makes it clear from the get-go that the tyrant is dead and not living out his days in the jungles of South America. The goal was to poke holes in the conspiracy theories espoused by hate-filled individuals who would continue to look up to the former chancellor and insist that he escaped justice.
“I don’t when something is opaque and the truth is not explained or shown fully, and it allows for some insipid, horrible conspiracy to get out there,” the director says. “There were moments where I could have insinuated that the dead body that they think is Hitler is maybe not Hitler. I didn’t want to do that.”
Charlotte Vega as “Brana” and the cast of Ben Parker’s BURIAL.
Courtesy of IFC Midnight
The film achieves this via a framing device, in which an older Brana (played by Dame Harriet Walter) recounts the tale to a skinhead who has broken into her home.
According to Parker, Dame Diana Rigg was originally attached before her unfortunate passing in September of 2020 (the actress’s final onscreen role came in Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho). “Harriet was nice enough to say that she didn’t mind stepping into those shoes and she can fill them, absolutely. It’s a great role for her,” the director says. “She likes playing slightly different — maybe not wholly nice — characters.”
Wizarding World alum Tom Felton co-stars as Gaunt, a kind-hearted Polish citizen who has only just begun to accept the hellish reality of what has happened to his country when he claps eyes on the body of the man responsible for all the bloodshed.
“I pitched Tom the idea of possibly doing the bad guy and he quite rightly pointed out a better role that he wanted to do,” Parker admits. “And he was absolutely right. He came to it with the knowledge that he’s a Harry Potter villain to many people and thought, ‘I’m going to subvert that.’”
Tom Felton as “Gaunt” in Ben Parker’s “BURIAL.”
Courtesy of IFC Midnight
Felton officially signed onto the project after a lengthy Zoom chat with Parker. “We just chatted for many hours … about history and these stories and the different ways in which people come out of conflict,” the filmmaker concludes. “This was before all the sh** in Ukraine. So we were talking about the horrors of not only the stuff that happens in war, but also what happens afterwards. How a person breaks, how a nation’s personality changes.”
Burial hits theaters and On Demand Friday, Sep. 2.
Filmmaker Ben Parker Comments On Rise Of Modern-Day Fascism Through Lens Of WW2 Thriller (Interview)
Charlotte Vega as “Brana” in Ben Parker’s “BURIAL.”
You’ve probably heard the adage a billion times: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
The immortal words of George Santayana had never felt more relevant to Ben Parker than they did in 2016 when, like many of us, the filmmaker bore witness to a parade of White Supremacists marching through the streets of Charlottesville, tiki torches clutched in their hands as they shouted a hateful refrain — “Jews will not replace us!”
Fascist ideals were alive and well in the 21st century, proving for the umpteenth time that humans cannot (or will not) learn from the mistakes of their forebears. Sickened by what he saw, Parker wanted to add his voice to the cultural conversation.
“It was me being sick of people pointing to something and saying, ‘This is the thing to blame. And if you do this, if you build this, if you get out of this, everything will be great, and it’ll solve all your problems,’” the filmmaker tells me over Zoom, alluding to the authoritarian stratagems of scapegoating and… *ahem* wall construction. “Then when it gets down to it, it’s nothing but a bunch of lies and there’s nothing there. I wanted to point the finger in that direction, not-so-subtly.”
CHARLOTTESVILLE, USA – AUGUST 11: Peter Cvjetanovic (R) along with Neo Nazis, Alt-Right, and White … [+] Supremacists encircle and chant at counter protestors at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson after marching through the University of Virginia campus with torches in Charlottesville, Va., USA on August 11, 2017. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
At the time, Parker (not to be confused with Spider-Man’s uncle) was tinkering with the script for a short film the director likens to a “a campfire tale,” in which a collection of Russian soldiers transport the corpse of Adolf Hitler back to Moscow in the turbulent aftermath of World War II. “That’s mostly what’s going on in my head when I’m writing any story: ‘Could I entertain someone around a campfire with this story? Could I entertain my friends? Could I entertain a listener?’”
While in the process of researching the life and career Andrey Vlasov (a Soviet military leader who collaborated with the Nazis) for the purposes of a different film, he came across the story of Elena Rzhevskaya, a Jewish NKVD intelligence officer tasked with verifying the remains of the Führer in the smoking ruins of Berlin, circa 1945.
“I thought, ‘Wow, that’s too much of an interesting story,’ especially if it was contested by the Soviet government [which said] ‘No, no, this didn’t happen. She never did this,’” Parker says. “And she swears that this is true. All that stuff was so interesting and I thought, ‘Well, can I make an entertaining thriller out of that?’”
The result was Burial. Set to be released by IFC Midnight this week, the taut, 95-minute period thriller stars Charlotte Vega (Warrior Nun) as Brana, the leading member of a classified mission sanctioned by Stalin himself to bring a priceless box back to the USSR through war-torn Poland.
***WARNING! The following contains minor spoilers for the film!***
This container is so valuable, in fact, that it must be buried every night, lest the “Werewolves” — a band of German partisans who refuse to accept that the war is lost — get their goose-stepping mitts on it. While these guerrilla fighters really did exist, their numbers and efficacy were highly exaggerated by the propaganda disseminated by Joseph Goebbels.
“I think you learn the rules and then you break the rules,” Parker explains. “I did the research and then I broke the research. I did as much research as I could to make sure that I wasn’t stepping too far out of the bounds of reality. But I knew that I was. I knew that the Werewolves were hugely over-mythologized for being a larger group than they were.”
While not an out-and-out horror flick, Burial does flirt with the genre (without veering into the pulpiness of, say, Julius Avery’s Overlord) when the Werewolves make use of naturally-occurring hallucinogenics to disorient their enemies.
“It was a horrific event scarred into our history, scarred into the minds of everybody who lived through it,” Parker says when why WWII is an ideal backdrop for horror elements. “You don’t want to get bogged down in exposition. If you’re doing a sci-fi [project] and a future war, you have to explain everything. With World War II, you’ve seen everything and you know how horrific it can be … It does stand as a really good storytelling device to show people, ‘Hey, look, this happened not so long ago — it can happen again if you’re not too careful. Here are the horrors that happened, don’t go down that path again.’ It’s good to tap into people’s psyches about that.”
‘Burial’ key art
Burial also leans into the grand cinematic tradition of soldiers-on-a-mission films like Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and, more importantly, Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen — the latter of which employed Parker’s grandfather as a technical advisor.
“What I love about those mission films, is that people just get picked off quite unceremoniously,” Parker says. “Telly Savalas and Jim Brown, they’re just dead, and then that’s it. We just carry on with the mission. There’s something quite horrific about these big stars just being killed off. That stuck with me. I tried to carry that on to the way that I shot [this] film and wrote the script.”
Given the severity of the overall assignment handed down to the Russian soldiers, you’d think they were carrying the Ark of the Covenant. However, the box’s contents are about as far as one can get from the two stone tablets Moses is said to have brought down from Mount Sinai in the earliest days of a people the Nazis would attempt to wipe off the face of the Earth. No — this package contains the rotting remains of a small and megalomaniacal psychopath responsible for the death of millions.
“Even dead, he’s still dangerous and every character that comes into contact with this corpse acts a different way, has a feeling about it,” Parker explains. “It’s not a box of treasure, it’s a box of evil. On set, everybody felt the same way. As soon as you open up that crate and there’s this horrible corpse inside, everybody felt horrible.”
Not wanting to glorify Hitler in any way, Parker makes it clear from the get-go that the tyrant is dead and not living out his days in the jungles of South America. The goal was to poke holes in the conspiracy theories espoused by hate-filled individuals who would continue to look up to the former chancellor and insist that he escaped justice.
“I don’t when something is opaque and the truth is not explained or shown fully, and it allows for some insipid, horrible conspiracy to get out there,” the director says. “There were moments where I could have insinuated that the dead body that they think is Hitler is maybe not Hitler. I didn’t want to do that.”
Charlotte Vega as “Brana” and the cast of Ben Parker’s BURIAL.
The film achieves this via a framing device, in which an older Brana (played by Dame Harriet Walter) recounts the tale to a skinhead who has broken into her home.
According to Parker, Dame Diana Rigg was originally attached before her unfortunate passing in September of 2020 (the actress’s final onscreen role came in Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho). “Harriet was nice enough to say that she didn’t mind stepping into those shoes and she can fill them, absolutely. It’s a great role for her,” the director says. “She likes playing slightly different — maybe not wholly nice — characters.”
Wizarding World alum Tom Felton co-stars as Gaunt, a kind-hearted Polish citizen who has only just begun to accept the hellish reality of what has happened to his country when he claps eyes on the body of the man responsible for all the bloodshed.
“I pitched Tom the idea of possibly doing the bad guy and he quite rightly pointed out a better role that he wanted to do,” Parker admits. “And he was absolutely right. He came to it with the knowledge that he’s a Harry Potter villain to many people and thought, ‘I’m going to subvert that.’”
Tom Felton as “Gaunt” in Ben Parker’s “BURIAL.”
Felton officially signed onto the project after a lengthy Zoom chat with Parker. “We just chatted for many hours … about history and these stories and the different ways in which people come out of conflict,” the filmmaker concludes. “This was before all the sh** in Ukraine. So we were talking about the horrors of not only the stuff that happens in war, but also what happens afterwards. How a person breaks, how a nation’s personality changes.”
Burial hits theaters and On Demand Friday, Sep. 2.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshweiss/2022/09/01/burial-filmmaker-ben-parker-comments-on-rise-of-modern-day-fascism-through-lens-of-ww2-thriller-interview/