In Bleeding Blue Bird, Paris-based director Lev Prudkin opens a trapdoor beneath the stage and plunges us into the metaphysical. Making its world premiere in New York on October 18, the film introduces a surreal fever dream of theatrical obsession, identity fracture, and the dangerous blurring of art and life in this UK-Russia-Ukraine co-production, shot on location in Kyiv before the war. The film is currently seeking distribution.
Starring Arthur Darvill (Doctor Who, Broadchurch) as a tormented theatre director and Hannah Arterton (Walking on Sunshine, The Peripheral) as a mythic Queen of Night, the film is anything but a conventional drama. Set against the haunting backdrop of a production of The Blue Bird, Prudkin’s film becomes a shape‑shifting spectacle—one where the performance begins to leak into the performers’ very lives.
Bleeding Blue Bird is not an adaptation of Maeterlinck but a film about what happens when art escapes the stage and invades life.
That premise is both the film’s philosophical engine and its emotional abyss.
Where Theatre Ends and Madness Begins
When the actor playing the Cat in the troupe’s production disappears, the Director steps into the role himself. But the further he immerses in the part, the less he can distinguish performance from reality. Outsiders infiltrate the cast. The play mutates. Familiar characters fracture into dreamlike archetypes, as the boundaries of the production—and the director’s mind—erode.
Shot on location in Kyiv’s Theatre on Podil, the setting becomes both a literal and symbolic stage. The film’s design—costume, set, lighting—conjures a world that feels ceremonial and claustrophobic. Performers drift through narrow corridors and cavernous auditoriums like ghosts trapped in ritual.
A Film of Transformation
Arthur Darvill delivers a magnetic, increasingly unhinged performance as the Director—a man not directing a play, but consumed by one. Opposite him, Hannah Arterton’s Queen of Night exudes a mythic menace, her presence suggesting not just opposition but temptation.
Their dance is psychological and metaphysical, a collision of identities that challenges the viewer to question where the actor ends and the character begins.
Supporting roles by Iryna Kudashova (Sonya) and Alina Kovalenko (Light) deepen the film’s themes of fragmentation and fluid identity. What begins as an ensemble theatre piece becomes a dreamscape haunted by obsession and metamorphosis.
A New Kind of Cinema
“Bleeding Blue Bird is an experience, not a story,” says Prudkin. He describes it as “a film of sensations, visions, and premonitions.” Indeed, the film resists traditional structure in favor of hypnotic mood and thematic density.
Its score, composed by Jim Cornick and Matt Loveridge, blurs seamlessly with tracks by Depeche Mode, Actress, and Else, creating an atmosphere that’s electronic, elegiac, and subtly ominous. The sound design envelops the audience in an echo chamber of voices, memories, and theatrical cues.
Myth, Madness, and Meaning
At its core, Bleeding Blue Bird is about the cost of artistic obsession—what it means to become the very thing you set out to create. The transformation is not metaphorical; it’s literal. The Director does not merely perform the Cat—he becomes it. The theatre becomes a space of spiritual alchemy, and performance, a form of possession.
“Cinema isn’t a reproduction of reality—it’s a living thing that transforms us,” says Prudkin.
The film seems designed not just to be watched but to haunt, to slip beneath the skin of its audience and ask dangerous questions. Who are we when no one’s watching? When do masks become permanent?
The Production Behind the Magic
Produced by Mirage Adventures Studios & Sterling Pictures, the film is a UK‑Ukraine-Russia co-production. Executive producer Michael Riley brings a reputation for supporting boundary‑pushing cinema. The runtime is 1h 43min, and it is presented in 5.1 surround sound. The production was shot in 2.40:1 aspect ratio.
The choice of Kyiv’s Theatre on Podil grounds the film in the tangible residue of theatrical architecture, giving the surreal narrative a ghostly home.
A Daring Debut
With Bleeding Blue Bird, Lev Prudkin has delivered a film that draws upon his childhood backstage in the Moscow theater world, watching his famous grandfather, Mark Prudkin, the three-time Stalin prize laureate perform.
It is poetic, provocative, and deeply original. Its world premiere marks the arrival of a filmmaker unafraid to collapse the boundaries between dream and waking life, art and identity.
Trailer: