Operation “Alexander”

As always, I took the lens of an absurd comedy. With this approach, I wanted to create satire to mock the illogical rules of such a system. As a framework, I thought of an Eastern European joke popular in the 2010s about an imaginary authority called Humor Police which was supposed to be called whenever someone makes a bad joke. In my film, the Humor Police arrests people for laughing and smiling. They explain it as dangerous actions undermining the seriousness within the society.

Humor Police is a great metaphor for a system whose focus is clearly shifted from what actually threatens the safety of the population like terrorism or violence, towards something that threatens its own authority. The two main characters are two opposites: a humor policeman, although undercover, and a comedian. Their opposition, their dialogues and the circumstances they are put in signal at how different and conflicting their worldviews are. At the same time, the humor policeman slowly comes to the realization as he is failing his mission that the comedian is not as bad as he thought as a person. The result of the film is clear: the rules are absurd and after all, the humor policeman and the comedian become friends with similar worldviews.

With this, I am trying to communicate how I envision mass-marketed narratives: they might not always serve morally right ideas and values.