Debut: "The List of Stupid Questions I Ask Myself When I’m High" Throws Reality Into Sharp Focus

Why is my kindness for others, and not me? When did making friends become such misery?

Subtitled “A young woman ponders life’s big questions in a surreal space where time stands still,” the list of stupid questions I ask myself when I’m high is a meditation on the mundane. A young woman softly recites a rhyming list of questions ranging from existential to comical: 

Is creativity merely skilled emulation?

Why do dogs stick their noses in my crotch?

Each question is stated in the same calm and listless tone. Philosophical musings like, “Is the Lord merciful?” are given equal importance to inquiries like, “Why do I open so many tabs on a porn crawl?” Similarly, the protagonist interacts with unremarkable objects in remarkable ways – lying underneath a mattress, holding a wine glass with her feet, pinning her hair to a clothesline. Against soft piano music and in a muted blue hue, the viewer accepts these strange interactions alongside the questions posed by the narration, destabilizing ideas about what must be questioned and what can be taken as unknowable.

Director Sergii Shetsov composed the rhyming, sonnet-like poem that chews over the quotidian – daily questions whose answers evade us, but which we rarely stop to ask anyway. As the film’s protagonist interacts with typical things in atypical ways, these unacknowledged questions take on new urgency. Shetsov wrote the list of stupid questions I ask myself when I’m high while living in Kyiv, Ukraine, a year and a half prior to the beginning of the war, when the reliability of the everyday began to crumble. 

Shetsov frames these questions as things one asks when they’re high, and certainly, they do remind viewers of the kind of rumination that seems to only happen under the influence. But placed in the context of impending war and the existentialism that accompanies it, Shetsov’s poem takes on new meaning. He writes, 

The questions that take hold when the noise around us dulls can channel our deepest thoughts into mundane matters that go unexplained. 

There is nothing like the apprehension of doom, the threat of approaching chaos, to quiet the noise around us. Knowing what may be coming, it seems that Shetsov is preemptively mourning the loss of the humdrum of normal life – of a dog sniffing your crotch, or of holding a glass of wine… Things that one misses when they are ripped away. With the anticipation of war, these basic interactions are couched as blessings, phenomena equally sacred as “the Lord” or “creativity.” 

The list of stupid questions I ask myself when I’m high calmly throws the viewer into disarray. Visually spellbinding and sonically enchanting, this very short film manages to dislodge its audiences’ perception of reality in under three minutes.