Marija Kavtaradze’s new movie Slow recently held its world premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, where the magical mountain honored the Lithuanian native with the best directing price in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition category. Slow, Kavtaradze’s second feature after Summer Survivors, tells a uniquely intriguing love story between a modern dancer named Elena (Greta Grinevičiūtė), who falls in love with a sign language interpreter Dovydas (Kęstutis Cicėnas), who identifies himself as an asexual.

When Dovydas gets assigned a job to interpret for Elena who teaches a group of young deaf students, the pair quickly develop a strong, emotional bond, even when Dovydas confesses he isn’t sexually attracted to anyone. The asexual romantic drama shows a fresh viewpoint on intimacy between the relationship of the two lead characters across the movie screen.

Where did your desire to make an asexual love story onscreen come from?

I started to grow an interest on the subject, when I came across an article online about asexuality. I found it very interesting and started thinking how confusing it must be to live in a world that is so sexualized, when a person doesn’t really have an interest or cares about sex. So, reading upon for the first time, I got hooked. When I started writing the screenplay it was helping me to get into this topic. One of the main characters is asexual and this movie’s focal point is on the relationship story between him and a dancer who is not asexual. Yet, this is not the main topic of my film, for I really wanted to focus on showing intimacy between these two characters and display the different desires in relationships and especially their physical needs.

Besides your growing interest in the subject, was there a correlation in your life that caught your attention to want to write about it?

I really wanted to make a romantic film, I desired to tell a love story, for it’s always very meaningful to me. I sought to tell a story about hope. To see two people, fall in love and watch how they try to make it work, is simply beautiful.

I wanted to really develop these characters and even though it was a challenging subject and quite a difficult story to tell, for I had a lot of questions myself, like: if there is no sexual attraction, then what is this one thing that makes these characters fall in love? I found out that these kinds of questions are what motivated me and inspired my writing. I wanted to create an arc and have enough problems to solve to know how to end this story.

Also, when I write, I slowly get closer and closer to directing, because in the beginning of my writing cycle, I think a lot more about the personages, then about the story and about the feelings that I want the film to bring. Some visual cinematics also developed, for I knew quite early while still writing this script that we were going to need to shoot this movie on 16 millimeters film