Bleeding Blue Bird

A Film by Lev Prudkin

When performance devours reality.

Bleeding Blue Bird is a surreal symbolist metadrama where theatre invades life. Starring Arthur Darvill (Doctor Who) and Hannah Arterton (Walking on Sunshine), the film blurs stage and reality, exploring art, obsession, and the dangerous cost of imagination.

Synopsis

A travelling troupe stages Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird. When the actor playing the Cat is abducted, the director steps into the role. What begins as a performance unravels into a surreal confrontation where theatre and life collapse into one another. Outsiders infiltrate the stage, archetypes fracture, and art itself becomes a battleground of obsession, corruption, and metamorphosis.

Style and Vision

Poetic, surreal, and uncompromising, Bleeding Blue Bird explores the porous boundary between stage and reality. Director Lev Prudkin fuses metacinema with dream logic, crafting a work of haunting intensity where performance consumes life.

Highlights

• Music features original score alongside tracks by Depeche Mode, Actress and Else
• Lead performance by Arthur Darvill, acclaimed for Doctor Who and Broadchurch
• Hannah Arterton as the enigmatic Queen of Night
• Filmed on location in Kyiv’s Theatre on Podil

Director’s Statement

Bleeding Blue Bird is not an adaptation of Maeterlinck but a film about what happens when art escapes the stage and invades life. I grew up backstage in a family of theatre people, surrounded by rehearsals, costumes, and the hidden world behind the curtain. I wanted to capture that atmosphere of awe and danger, a place where transformation is constant and where performance can consume reality itself.

The film is built as an experience rather than a conventional narrative. I wanted audiences to enter a maze of sensations, visions, and premonitions, to feel how the line between theatre and life becomes porous. For me, cinema is not about reproducing heritage but about creating something alive that transforms us. Bleeding Blue Bird is my attempt to show that art, when truly free, is both fragile and powerful, capable of unsettling us while reminding us of what it means to dream.

Cast and Crew Spotlight

Cast

• Arthur Darvill (Doctor Who, Broadchurch) as The Director
• Hannah Arterton (Walking on Sunshine, The Peripheral) as The Queen of Night
• Iryna Kudashova (The Taste of Freedom) as Sonya
• Alina Kovalenko (The Rising Hawk, Kruty 1918) as Light

Key Crew

• Director Lev Prudkin
• Writer and Editor Lev Prudkin
• Producer Vladimir Prudkin
• Executive Producer Michael Riley
• Director of Photography Boris Litovchenko
• Music Jim Cornick, Matt Loveridge, with tracks by Depeche Mode, Actress and Else
• Production and Costume Design Olena Drobna
• Makeup Tetiana Tatarenko
• Sound Michael Goorevich
• Casting Manuel Puro, Oleksandra Vostrikova
• Script Yulia Muzyka

Key Facts

Technical Specifications

Links

• Official Website: cannesfilmagency.com/bleeding-blue-bird
• IMDb: imdb.com/title/tt27111256

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