Mikhail Dvortsov on "The Art of Knowing"

We chose this logline because it seems to best denote the focal theme of the film’s story: the inescapable, fateful and sometimes seemingly irreversible degradation of civilization due to human propensity to believe in unknowable ideas.

For years Elena and I have been working on our “believing method”. This film is an artistic experiment where we chose to collide this method with almost every belief scheme that is out there: belief in god, love, happiness, freedom, human rights, family, democracy. You can see and judge the outcome by ordering a DVD of the film.

From the perspective of our artistic genus or creative approach Elena and I say that just like philosophy has been advanced by incorporating scientific method it’s time to reclaim art by applying to it the revitalizing scrutiny of reason.

Another thing of importance should be noted. Elena and I are effectual atheists. But although we reject the validity of religious dogma that always favors endurance of a particular group of people, we by no means are materialists.

Rather the underlying message of our work is to encourage people to question the notion of causality of human freedom as something given by God or evolved from an organic matter.

That’s why one can easily describe “A Book Of Truth, A Book Of Lies” as an anti-monistic manifesto. We are basically saying that if our free will is caused then it is not free. And since both divine and material causes preclude free will from coming into existence - we take on a position of causal agnosticism by liberating human freedom from any cause - thus suggesting that we are in fact breathtakingly freer that any religious or materialistic philosophies endowed humanity with.

Not surprisingly then that “A Book Of Truth, A Book Of Lies” tells the story of how our unbridled faith into unexamined causal notions of happiness, love, family values corrupt human freedom and turn humans against each other. We present our vision by having our protagonists met with such a hail of opposition that the story’s logic warrants a provocative film’s conclusion that humanity is not of a single origin, that maybe there is more than one conscious species that inhabits the earth. Why don’t you see for yourself how exactly it happens when you buy our film. And thank you for supporting our work.