A boy turns on an old camcorder. He points it at his grieving relatives and starts recording their reactions. He is promptly scolded, so he turns off the camcorder. A memory stored in an object: this is how the 2025 short film “Journey of a Mattress” begins.
One of the most striking aspects of “Пътешествието на един матрак” – “The Journey of a Mattress” (2025), is the artful way in which the film manages to cram so much emotion and meaning in something as ordinary and overlooked as an old, yellowing bed mattress. Teetering between tragedy and comedy, the film gradually recontextualizes the titular mattress from a mere movie prop into a repository of memory and meaning. Much like its silent protagonist, the film itself is befittingly very subtle in the ways that it goes about addressing its overarching themes, with meaning drawn not so much from actual dialogues between characters, but rather through the “journey” itself: the movement of said mattress across time and space.
In a way, it could be argued that the mattress accumulates meaning as it moves throughout the various settings of the film, namely from the intimate domestic space of a family home, to a very much public flea market and junk yard. This idea took me back to my own readings on social and cultural anthropology. Anthropologists have long been interested in the odd ways that inanimate objects come to connect people. For Mauss this was articulated through gift giving (1925), for Malinowski it was the Kula exchanges (1922), whereas for others like Goody, it was through the process of dowry and the hereditary transmission of material goods (1976). In yet another example, Arjun Appadurai’s volume in the “Social life of things”, the initially peculiar concept of objects leading “social lives”, becomes a broader exploration of the meaning people attribute to things, and how these meanings connect to culturally constructed notions of commodity, exchange and regulation. In this sense, people come to find value in things, and things, in turn, give value to social relations.
The film opens with a family quietly mourning over the loss of their grandmother, who is shown lying lifeless on a bed. Later on, her two daughters lay together, presumably on the same squeaking mattress, sharing a tender moment of intimate sisterly love, in the advent of profound loss. As they lay there, one of them begins to reminisce about a time when the mattress felt almost magical to her, inspiring fantastical stories of imaginary worlds in her young mind. There is a brief moment of hesitation, but by the next scene the mattress is already being thrown out alongside the trash, perhaps because it has become too much of an inconvenience to the family. And thus begins the journey of this mattress, stubbornly persisting and passing from one person to the other, until it ultimately arrives where all unused human things end up: the junk yard. The film concludes with two people ripping into the now abandoned mattress, only to find money left inside by its original family, perhaps reserved for a time of need.
In light of the previous anthropological insight, I would argue that the mattress acquires meaning precisely because of its movement. With every encounter, there is seemingly new meaning projected onto the mattress: some rest upon it, others reminisce over it, some are inconvenienced by it, while others have their lives unexpectedly altered because of it. By the end of the film, the mattress becomes far more than just a simple object. It transforms into a record of everyday life of some sort, even the slightest human trace becomes imprinted into its fibers, commemorated in its foam, stored alongside its springs; traces of grief, of solace, comfort, exhaustion, intimacy, frustration, and even nostalgia.
Ultimately, “Jourmey of a Mattress” is a film about profoundly human stories told through an unlikely, but also overwhelmingly non-human protagonist. It is a quiet reflection on how material-centered human culture really is. Things outlast us, absorb moments of our everyday life and continue moving long after we ourselves have let them go. The mattress, in all its stubborn persistent presence, reminds us of how even such mundane objects can carry worlds of histories with them. These subtle and discreet histories “from below” that live inside everyday objects, are precisely what anthropologists have come to care about and seek to uncover.
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Konstantinos Chekimoglou –Undergraduate student at the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies. University of Macedonia.
An article inspired by “The Journey of a Mattress” which won the BBB First Entry Award at the 16th edition of BBB Short Film Festival