Artistic family - Visual Inspirations
The project draws from painters, illustrators, animators, filmmakers and visual storytellers who examine power, morality, social structures and human behaviour.
Film and Narrative Influences:
The idea of the building was initially inspired by Dekalog (1989) by Krzysztof Kieślowski — ten episodes based on the Ten Commandments, each following neighbors in the same building as they navigate moral failure.
It also resonates with High-Rise (2015) by Ben Wheatley, where the tower itself becomes a metaphor for social stratification and collapse — a vertical society in miniature, where proximity breeds both intimacy and violence.”
The tone and reflective pacing of the project are also informed by films such as Ikiru (1952), Wild Strawberries (1957), and The Seventh Seal (1957) by Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, where central characters confront existential thresholds.
Gus Van Sant’s Last Days (2005) — an imagined account of Kurt Cobain’s final days — informs the project’s contemplative atmosphere.
However, Neighbours does not narrate the literal final days of its characters. Instead, the approach remains entirely imaginary, expressed in a still painting or brought to life through animation, and is always rooted in the symbolic way when something inside a person changes or collapses.
Here, the Hate and Separation Factory’s mechanisms become visible in the smallest, most intimate shifts of the human spirit.
