Photo courtesy of Falco Ink

Belgium, Mexico, Spain, Japan, Dominican Republic, and the United States: these are just a few of the countries where film director Alex Burunova has lived. “A little bit here and there,” as she puts it. Her semi-nomadic lifestyle started when she was a child and has continued ever since. Growing up, she toured around the world with her mother, who was a saxophone player in a popular band in the former USSR, so much so that traveling is basically in her DNA, Burunova tells me during our 15-minute Zoom call the first morning of SXSW Film & TV Festival in Austin, Texas. This peripatetic lifestyle has given Burunova a distinct freedom that heavily influences her work, specifically her first full-length feature film, “Satisfaction,” which premiered at the festival.

“I have this kind of very global perspective on things where I’m not really bound to any specific place. And so when creating “Satisfaction”…I wasn’t tied down to one specific place, and it came together in such a cool international way,” Burunova explains, after telling me about the various countries she’s called home at one point or another.

“Satisfaction” centers on the tense, unsteady relationship between Lola (Emma Laird) and Phillip (Fionn Whitehead), a married British couple working on a musical composition while staying on Antiparos, a beautifully chilling Greek island. The story shifts from when they first met, at music school in England, to their present time on the island. On Antiparos, Lola meets Elena (Zar Amir Ebrahimi), an alluring local on the island whom Lola brings into her relationship with Phillip for a threesome. In this slow burn, every action is motivated by some untold event from the past that the audience must slowly piece together until it’s finally revealed.

An important takeaway from Burunova’s peripatetic lifestyle? No one knows who you are when you travel somewhere new. The awesome benefit? “You get to be whoever you want to be,” she shares. Instead of placing Lola and Phillip in their home city of London for the majority of the film, Burunova sets them on a remote island that coaxes Lola onto an intense, tumultuous, but above all healing path to rediscover herself and find the courage to move on from a traumatic event that continues to haunt her.

“She meets this woman that doesn’t know her, and she gets to rediscover herself through the eyes of this woman, [which] helps her healing journey, helps her redefine her own story,” Burunova explains, talking about Elena. In a way, Elena and Lola symbolize two different stages in Burunova’s life. “My middle name is Elena, so Elena is also me now that I’m older. And so this is a character that’s helping Lola rediscover herself, and helping Lola get through this painful event,” she tells me.

The film came together gradually over ten years, a journey that became to Burunova her own form of processing and healing from past events in her own life. Now, she says, she can finally hand over the story to audiences, aiming to spark meaningful and important conversations. “My hope for the film is that as many young women [as possible] see this film and hopefully take something away from it. It deals with difficult topics. It deals with healing trauma, and I hope that it will help somebody,” she adds.

A salient element of the film is its setting. The island where Burunova shot the film was the seventh and final one she visited when scouting filming locations. “When I stepped off the ferry, I felt this feeling like I’ve been there before. It was a recognition. It was almost a spiritual connection.” In the film, Antiparos feels like its own character. The viewer hears the island calling out, perhaps to Lola, through the waves that crash on its shore, the wind that blows, and the dogs that bark in the distance, along with a myriad of other sounds. All together, they function as their own score.

For the island’s vibrant soundscape to become apparent to viewers, many of the scenes between characters are free of dialogue. Burunova shares that in the initial filming of a scene, Laird, Whitehead, and Ebrahimi would stick to the scripted dialogue. Afterwards, they’d go back and do the scene again, but without dialogue. Burunova’s process (which she learned through her background in theater) leads to visual scenes that, many times, speak louder than their counterparts with dialogue. To successfully capture the emotions and thoughts of each character, Laird and Whitehead had notes so extensive that their scripts had tripled in size, Burunova recalls. Along with their notetaking, Laird and Whitehead also lived together in an Airbnb for a short time right before filming began.

“We worked with Emma for six months to prepare her for this role and get her to really immerse in this character. And then she and Finn stayed in the Airbnb together, kind of like immersing, staying in character, cooking together and building memories as these characters, so that they can throw away the script on set and speak from the heart. So a lot of the scenes were improvised,” Burunova says.

On the island, the house in which Lola and Phillip stay in is an “architectural gem,” Burunova says. It’s a modern, white house on the edge of a cliff that overlooks the ocean, its blue waves reflecting a cerulean light inside the house. “But it’s also very geometric. It has this really strong linear motif, really strong lines to it, so it almost feels like a cage,” she explains.

When leaving the confinement of the house, Lola is able to explore her identity as a bisexual woman in a city where no one knows her, especially when meeting Elena, who is ultimately the person who pushes her in the direction of healing. Burunova, who identifies as queer, speculates during our conversation that at their cores, everyone is at least a little gay. She’s a firm believer that we are all constantly rediscovering ourselves, at all times throughout our lives. “I don’t really believe in monosexual identity. I believe that sexual identity is fluid and ever-changing,” she explains. Evidently, in “Satisfaction,” every character is queer — before the final cut was edited she tells me that the film even featured a queer fisherman.

Ultimately, “Satisfaction” is a film that deals with an emotionally difficult story of abuse, warning its viewers of the detriments of unaddressed trauma. While the path to healing is anything but easy, “Satisfaction” implores us to listen to our human nature, the part that calls us towards connecting with others, leaning on each other to supercede trauma. But ultimately, the power to heal comes from within oneself. The film thrives on a unique sort of silence, an absence of dialogue whose void is filled by the rich soundscapes of the settings it finds itself in, coupled with stunning cinematography.