In today’s storytelling, female characters are no longer confined to the narrow frame of “the right perspective.” And in her new role, Anna Silverman reveals the delicate inner world of a woman surrounded by a reality determined to tear it apart.
In the short film Bittersweet, inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Anna draws the viewer into a whirlpool of contradictions. What begins as a theatre rehearsal slowly unravels into a layered and deeply intimate portrait of a woman grappling with truth and vulnerability.
Set almost entirely in a confined theatre dressing room and stage space, Bittersweet is a piece, purposefully stripped of grand visuals in favour of raw atmosphere. The director chose tight framing, dim lighting and minimal cuts to focus on the suffocating emotional proximity between three characters. This intentional claustrophobia – both emotional and spatial becomes the invisible fourth character, pressing on the actors and on the audience
“You feel like the walls are closing in,” Anna shares. “There’s no visual escape, no metaphorical breath of air. That was the point – to trap emotion inside the frame and see what breaks first”
Anna plays an actress rehearsing the role of Nastasya Filippovna – but the lines between performance and reality quickly dissolve. The story becomes layered with exploration of a woman stepping into a role that acts as a mirror to her own hidden pain. The vulnerability of Nastasya, who in Dostoevsky’s novel is both worshipped and discarded.
“This wasn’t a character I could just ‘perform,” Anna says. “It was like living in two skins.”
To understand Nastasya, Anna read the private diaries of 19th-century women. Not to “get into character,” but to find a voice — quiet, unpolished, unsanitized. Those pages were filled with things never said aloud: resentment, fear, rage. Back then, such feelings were silenced. Today, they’re often rewarded — but the fear remains. If you feel too deeply, it still threatens to undo you.
“We live in a world that talks a lot about strength,” she says, “and sometimes forgets that showing weakness is also a kind of strength. But I was more interested in something else — the fear of not finding strength at all, in a world that keeps forcing you to fight or fall apart.”
The world of Bittersweet is made of collision — between Anna’s character and Nastasya, between the past and a present that pulls her into someone else’s madness. And she doesn’t resist — she becomes part of it.
“There were moments when everything fell away,” Anna admits. “Something would shift inside, and I wasn’t acting anymore — I was just there.”
Her performance is about something quiet but radical: a woman who doesn’t beg, doesn’t run, doesn’t save or destroy – she simply stays. She stays with her pain, her conflict, herself. She endures.
“For me, this role wasn’t about love, or revenge, or redemption. It was about not breaking in front of broken people. About not dissolving in something that’s trying to erase you.”
The power of Bittersweet lies in it’s refusal to explain or resolve. It simply reflects. And in making this film, Anna embraced a method of existing inside the uncomfortable space of “unacceptable truths.”
“The best thing we can give as actors is our truth,” she says. “Not the polished version — the one that trembles, that doubts, and still comes into the light”
As Bittersweet prepares for its festival run, Anna hopes the film will reach women — and anyone tired of pretending. Those who no longer need to conquer, save, or shatter — just to feel alive.
“We don’t need to be heroes or victims. We just need to be real. That’s enough.”
And in Bittersweet, Anna Silverman is exactly that: not just an actress playing a role, but a woman brave enough to stay in the quiet discomfort of her character and invite us to feel something honest in return.
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“We don’t need to be heroes or victims. We just need to be real. That’s enough.”
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Featured photo credit: Adrian Placek
