Devon. December 28 2011 – 2 Jan 2012

Devon. December 28 2011 – 2 Jan 2012. I must have been gazing out over the bleak English Channel too long, I look round and the Christmas trees are discarded, lying forgotten by the roads, the fireworks spent, wrapping paper filled recycling bags carefully ejected. 2012 has arrived; as well as marking the end of time on the Mayan calander, 2012 will be the defining year for Zorokovich vodka. After all it’s the year our film comes out in cinemas and on TV, and if the vodka brand is going to succeed, it will be this year that it does.

As part of the new time flowing in, I’m moving the emphasis away from my film directing and instead venturing through the streets of London every day, out to meet new people and places who might like to stock the vodka. I’m way outside of my comfort zone discovering new characters and places, traversing communities and cultures, moving through the micro-worlds of London. On the journey I have to play many roles, vodka brand owner in meetings, briefing PR companies, building the identity of a new business; film director at festivals and in interviews, door to door salesman when I look in the mirror. Of all these the notion of being the uninvited alcohol salesman fills me with complete dread, however the experience of the whole thing of inhabiting the radically diverse, conflicting roles is just too good, too interesting to leave unrecorded. The constant confrontation with the fear of rejection does not make it disappear but it must be lived with. The journey into areas of London I would never have explored is of real interest. Each day I pick a place and drive the three wheel van into it, full of vodka. And each day I hope that by night fall the van will be empty.

This is my attempt to capture the heart of what seems an unending stream of people, places, hopes, dreams, disappointments, highs and lows. All the fragments mean something when viewed together; all the mistakes, the wrong turns, the wonderful hunches which turned out to be true, they all stitch together to create a tapestry, something complete. And I can no longer film it, I cannot bring a camera person with me day in and day out; finally the vodka film is complete, it had its world premier at last October’s London Film Festival – but the adventure goes on and I need a medium which can harness the essence of it. So here we are, a blog, a notebook and an i-phone for photos.

This is Stav Bee, she popped into the Zorokovich orbit last year at a spontaneous art party in a railway arch in Bethnal Green, at which the Zorokovich Shot wagon was in attendence. She has become our pop up cocktail bar manager but she has that rare gift of being both an instigator of events and drama as well as a recorder of those flashes. Stav’s background as a photographer mean that her own unending stream of dramatic night time escapades are meticulously and atmospherically recorded and then represented online. Stav’s straight forward vivacious charm mixed with her expertise as a cocktail maker in outsider and bizarre locations have made her a compelling collaborator for the vodka brand.