WomenCinemakers, Special Edition, Vol.11 by WomenCinemakers

INDEPENDENT

WOMEN’S CINEMA JOLA KUDELA MEGAN HATTIE STAHL JES REYES AMIE NOWLAN CHRISTINA LYKOKA ANA CLARA MOLINARI JASMINE IDUN ISDRAKE JESSICA LAURÉN ILARIA DICARLO SONYA BERRY

Christina Lykoka

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Contents 04

Sonya Berry

126 Christina Lykoka

The Maze

Death of The Blackbird

146

Ilaria DiCarlo

Amie Nowlan

170

Jessica LaurĂŠn

Jes Reyes

198

Jasmine Idun Isdrake

Megan Hattie Stahl

106

216

Ana Clara Molinari

Jola Kudela

The Black Book of L.

To Garbo and Lenin

TIME

Fall of Sun

Vague Insanity

Beneath The Skin

Be Cute, Now!

I choose not to

Women Cinemakers meets

Sonya Berry Lives and works in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, USA

My work examines the constant motion that we create for ourselves, the desire and urges to escape, daydream, disappear, and pursue oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s innate impulsive yearnings; that often result in pain, setbacks, and unprocessed life experiences. In order to acquire clarity and defy fear, we first need to know and satisfy our intent and purpose in the face of transformation and change. Are we finding a sacred path, or simply forging ahead through lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s suffering? Setting aside time for focused reflection is key. Can we break through the challenges and dead ends of our lives to find higher meaning? Can we reach the door to enlightenment? The path is not easy, nor should it be. I search for answers and solutions through research and personal experience with two conflicting symbols, the Maze and Labyrinth. These pathways can be both a source of anguish and pain, as well as the hope of awakening latent recognitions to end sufferings. My multimedia approach is explored and deconstructed through experimental video, sound, painting and land art. The many layers of varying mediums, has allowed me to investigate the present time in which we live, as well as the painful past struggles, and the daunting future of possibility. By creating through more than one platform, working in nature, viewing the world behind a camera, and wielding a brush in the solitude of a studio my work has evolved and transformed, which reflects my research into change and transformation.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

is a captivating experimental short film by artist and filmmaker Sonya Berry: inquiring into the ubiquitous relationship between innate impulsive yearnings and the desire and urges to escape, she

initiates her audience into highteneed experience capable of encouraging a cross-pollination of the spectatorship. Featuring elegant cinematography and sapient composition, Berry's work speaks of the elusive bond between inner world and external reality, to explore the concepts of pain, setbacks, and unprocessed life experiences: we are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her captivating and multifaceted artistic production.

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Hello Sonya and welcome to : we would like to introduce you to our readers with a couple of questions about your background. Are there any experiences that did particularly influence your evolution as a filmmaker? Moreover, could you tell us your biggest influences and how did they influence the trajectory of your artistic research? Hello WomenCinemakers and thank you for the wonderful introduction! I took my first video art and production class in the Spring of 2017, while I was enrolled in the graduate program at the University of Arizona, where I was studying painting for my MFA. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been predominately a painter for many years, so stepping into an entirely new medium was full of many obstacles and challenges; however, the experience also allowed me the freedom of diving into this new process, with fresh eyes and without preconceived expectations, or fears of a tainted vision. I had reached a point with my painting, where I found myself more hesitate to take risks, and explore different styles. Taking on video came with a freedom and excitement that I have not felt in a long time with my artistic process. Even though I am just starting out in filmmaking, the concepts have always been present in my paintings. I mostly work on a large-scale, using up-close cropped images to convey drama and a cinematic moment for the viewer to step into and also

Women Cinemakers question the environment and narrative. Filmmaking puts my paintings in motion. One of the first films that was introduced to me in my video class, was “the hospital scene” in Werckmeister Harmonies by Bèla Tarr. The absence of words, paired with the powerful and haunting sounds, inspired and revealed to me how film could elevate an audience’s emotions. During the first three minutes of Federico Fellini’s film, 8½, there is a combination of surreal imagery and soundtrack. This is a key element that I strive to achieve in my work. Each frame of Un Chien Andalou, by Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dalì, felt like its own painting. With my continued research into the filmmaking world, I strive for my work to go beyond the surface of our own reality, with elements of unexpected imagery and unsettling sounds. we For this special edition of have selected , an extremely interesting experimental film that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at https://youtu.be/KU61VfrCNKo. What has at once captured our attention of your insightful inquiry into into one’s innate impulsive yearnings is the way you have provided the results of your artistic research with such multilayered quality. While walking our readers through the genesis of , would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea? I first started filming The Maze, right after I completed my first year of graduate school. Feeling burned out and

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lost, I went to a Meditation Mindfulness Retreat in Santa Rosa, California. With a week of seclusion and intense rounds of internal concentration and silence, I walked away filled with knowledge and truth that I had been avoiding most of my life. During those moments when a profound center within was reached, I felt contentment, ease, self-love and above all stillness,

leaving behind the constant motion that I had created for myself. Immediately after a friend picked me up at the retreat, we set out on a road trip touring California, where I started filming without a plan or clear concept in mind but rather filming when I felt inspired and mindful in moments that sparked my inner vision. I continued to

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film throughout the summer of 2017, while staying with

The land art project was the main device featured

friends in New York. and while visiting my hometown in

throughout the film. All of these components, my

Rhode Island. During the start of my second year at

experience at the retreat, my travels, and the

graduate school, I began working on my first land art

experience of working with the desert through my art,

project, My Maze, which was dug and created on The

were pieces to the puzzle that would eventually come

Island in Tucson, a non -profit organization that

to together in completing, The Maze. It kept growing

encompassed seven acres of land, in Tucson, Arizona.

and evolving more and more, it was hard to stop

Women Cinemakers filming, as I kept uncovering pieces to a puzzle that uncovered my own truth within myself. The Maze features elegantly structured composition: what were your aesthetic decisions when shooting? In particular, what was your choice about camera and lens? Almost all my shots were done in nature. My environment was my stage. During travels, through California, New York, Arizona, and Rhode Island, I would be mindful of my surroundings, which brought an unexplained inspiration from a certain tree, road, or land to begin filming. Although I knew the message I wanted to convey with the film, my aesthetic decisions when shooting, were often impulsive, unplanned and unquestioned, intuitive feelings versus logic. Being a new filmmaker and without the means to have my own camera and equipment, I was fortunate to be able to borrow cameras from friends during my travels, and able to utilize the excellent video equipment that the University offered. I shot most of my film with a DSLR Canon 70D, EF-S with 18 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 135mm, I found this lens to be gratifying for the variety of shots that I wanted to capture. The lens automatically focuses on a subject, even the object moves. The Maze draws heavily from the specifics of their environment to trigger a process of resonance with the viewers' perceptual parameters: how to you consider the role of natural realm and its evokative imagery within your artistic research? And in

Women Cinemakers particular, how did you select the locations for The Maze? Through traveling I was able to get a variety of locations, from the vast beauty of the desert, to the forests and beaches of California, as well as the open road. Each set the mood for me to play my role in the film. I felt alive while filming within nature, with its living presence. My locations for filming were not necessarily preplanned out, but came from a more intuitive place, whether it was taking a hike through the Big Sur and stumbling upon a fallen tree, or driving through the mountains in the desert at night to film a scene of walking down a dark road. The role of the natural realm within The Maze, represents a mode of listening that we have forgotten how to access; a sensuous language that we have discarded and ignored as irrational, I believe this has contributed to civilizationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s distrust of bodily and sensorial experiences. By shifting our auditory attention and our perceptual fields, we uncover the wild exchange between the senses that are calling for our participation once more; a link intertwining the human realm and that of the sacred. Your film features original mise-en-scĂ¨ne that combines the surreal and the expressionist into coherent mix and we have been particularly fascinated with the way walks the viewers through the thin line of conjunction between the real and the imagined: how do you consider the relationship between reality and the realm of imagination? Moreover, how much important is for

Women Cinemakers you to trigger the viewer's perceptual parameters in order to address them to elaborate personal associations? I wanted to convey the thin line that we all walk between the reality that we perceive on an often untouched surface and the underlying mysticism, that is always with us but rarely acknowledged. All of us have this access, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just a matter of being aware and being able to accept the unexplained and irrational, rather than forcing logic and facts in order to make sense of something that does not necessarily need an explanation but needs to be felt and absorbed in our spirts. By overlaying the audience with a myriad of images of surreal and expressionist with an amplified speed, I wanted the viewerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s perception to be questioned, as well as unsettled. With this combination, I pushed for the audience to be triggered into boundless emotions of the feeling of pain and dread, as well as peace and contentment. Marked with captivating minimalistic quality, the soundtrack provides the footage of The Maze with such enigmatic and a bit unsettling atmosphere: how do you consider the role of sound within your practice and how did you structure the relationship between sound and moving images? Sound is the most important element when it comes to my films. Before I can start editing a film I need the soundtrack to be complete, then I begin the process of matching up key devices with certain aspects of the soundtrack. In The Maze, I used and repeated phrases,

A still from

Women Cinemakers “try harder”, “how many more times?”, “run, run, run”, in combination with repeated sounds of knocking and banging on a door, the howling of the wind, ticking sounds of a clock, and counting backwards randomly. These repetitions were a representation of how one feels when defeated, along with a numbness or aversion to change and how the simple act of repeating of a phrase or being mindful of nature’s voice, can bring a sense of comfort and clarity, even if only for a moment. In another one of my films, “I’ll see you in my dreams” https://youtu.be/hw45ZRnmnLA which was about my experience with insomnia and the loss of control over one’s mind and body. The rhythmic sounds of breathing and counting backwards were matched up with repeated images, to set the mood for the audience to become apart of an unhinged, sleep deprived environment. The Maze communicates inner struggle and as you have remarked in your artist's statement, reflects the desire and urges to escape, daydream, disappear, and pursue one’s innate impulsive yearnings: how does your everyday life's experience fuel your artistic research? My work is extremely personal and intimate, but I have always shyed away from it being completely autobiographical. With my research I hope to achieve the balance of being universal and relatable for my audience. During the filming of The Maze, I chose to withdraw midway through my third semester at the University, which was an extremely difficult choice, that I am still grappling with. There was nothing more important to me than

Women Cinemakers completing my graduate studies. I have struggled for years with depression, additions along with insomnia, which got progressively worse over the past two years. As much as I wanted to continue my studies, I was unable to move forward, without sacrificing my health and wellbeing. Rich with symbols, The Maze could be considered an allegory of human journey: how did you structure the editing of your video in order to achieve such powerful results? In particular, how do you consider the role of symbols and metaphors within your practice? Being new to filmmaking, editing was quite a challenge for me. I knew what I wanted for the vision of the film, but at the same time I was still new to these tools, so I found myself experimenting with numerous techniques to achieve my vision. I had hours and hours of film, that I wanted to condense into about a three-minute film. I would watch clips over and over again, just to catch a moment that caught my attention. The key role of symbols throughout The Maze, are played throughout the film, with repetition and placed in different environments for the audience to convey their importance and meaning. The devices that I used were randomly uncovered and revealed to me throughout the filming. The door, which is placed in the center of the maze, can be a tool for enlightenment, as well as our resistance to change. The maze can trace our ability to get lost, with dead-ends and riddles that we canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t quite

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make sense of, my hand molds, showed connection of the loss of control of own body and mind and the repeated act of walking, is our strength to keep going even when we feel we have nothing left to offer. Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in the contemporary filmmaking scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something 'uncommon', however in the last decades women are finding their voices in art: as an artist interests in the cinematic arts, how would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? As I continue to explore more unconventional mediums, experimental video, sound, installation and land art, I know it will also be more of a challenge to sustain my art as a way to make a living. Although it comes with struggles, sacrifice and along with endless non-related art jobs that I have had to endure in order to continue to create my art, I know as an artist I will not be able to evolve and grow, if I play it safe and avoid risks. My view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field, is that as long as women do not consider their gender to be a factor and have confidence, along with guts and guile with their craft, then it will not be an â&#x20AC;&#x153;obstacleâ&#x20AC;? to be a women filmmaker, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll simply be filmmakers.

Women Cinemakers Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Sonya. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Currently, I am wrapping up a new experimental film, Paralysis Healing, which is a prequel to The Maze. Paralysis Healing, which deals with the conflicts within ourselves to continue and sustain ourselves on the path of healing. How does one sustain this state of being present and mindful? How does one transform and retire the old self? If one's life has been cycles of self-destruction, how can one begin to let go? There are endless questions of self-doubt, while one experiences a transformation of the self, but in the end it might to more painful to get lost in the maze in pursuit of the truth. I am also in the process of researching for a grant for my next land art piece, which will be a labyrinth, that will be interactive for the viewers to take a walk through the sacred path, in hopes of finding their own center. My first land art piece of the maze, actually started off as a labyrinth: however, I found at the time, I was not ready to walk the sacred steps that the labyrinth evokes in our beings. I got lost and could not find my way. Undaunted, I will carry on with my quest. Thank you so much for the opportunity to share my work with your viewers! An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Women Cinemakers meets

Ilaria Di Carlo Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

When I approached the idea of a metaphorical Black Book that records all the tragic events of one’s life, I wanted to explore the involuntary emotional states that trigger impulses of self-destruction and violence. The central theme of the film –and of the Black Book- is love. Love as the inexorable instinct triggered by the state of limerence that ripples through our identity and transforms us. This cathartic process first kills our inner child, and through repetition, erodes adulthood into old age. Through the Black Book, the protagonist stares at her demons reflected in a visual representation of the horror of her mental state that belongs in the realm of lyric poetry. The sheer power of the impulses and the inability of the protagonist, of ourselves, to curb the fear of abandonment and obsession with the loved one echoes the despair of classical tragedy. Reifying the Black Book adds a sinister undertone to the self-exploratory journey into the maelstrom of the inner self the film depicts. Ilaria Di Carlo is a visual artist working in the fields of filmmaking, scenography, and the performing arts. Raised in Italy, she graduated with honours in Scenography from the Fine Arts Academy in Rome and holds a Master in Scenography from the prestigious Central Saint Martin’s College of Art in London. She subsequently studied Digital Film Production at the SAE Institute of Berlin. Her current artistic work focuses on making moving image films that explore the theme of journey, the language of identity and metamorphosis in contrast with landscape and architecture. Her films are highly visual and aesthetic, inspired by the influence and impressive symbolism of the scenography. She has worked as a set, lighting, and costume designer for theatre and film, and as an actress in the total radical fiction theatre ensemble of Vegard Vinge & Ida Müller since 2011. She was also Vinge’s director assistant for the piece 12 Spartenhaus, performed at the Volksbühne in 2013. As a director, she has staged the durational performance Double/Act and the site-specific performance Booloohoom – Nocturne I, loosely based on James Joyce’s Ulysses. Her performance The Black Book inspired her to make her first short film, The Black Book of L. Her filmography includes the short films In Search of Lost Time and The Divine Way, filmed in 50 different locations around Germany.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Hello Ilaria and welcome to WomenCinemakers: we would invite our readers to visit http://ilariadicarlo.net

in order to get a wider idea about your artistic production and we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training: hold a BA of Scenography, from the Academy of Fine Arts, Rome, and after having earned your MA of Scenography

from the prestigious Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, London, and you later nurtured your education in Digital Film Production at SAE Institute, Berlin. How did these experiences influence your artistic evolution? In particular, did your cultural substratum due to your Italian roots direct the trajectory of your filmmaking practice, especially regarding the themes of landscape and architecture? It could be said exactly like that how you did define my improvement path from Academy of Arts to film field. But are not all of these worlds intertwined and connected in some way? All this is intervolved: my strong allure with architecture and scenography along with experimental film language. The beauty that comes from the outside and landscapes we are surrounded also affects us from within. All that we see, in addition to what we pass, is an important visual sign in everyday life. It was one way to express myself and share mine inner universe with the audience. Setting the characters from my films into spaces that fascinate me on the architectural and aesthetic level was the opportunity to express all emotions translated into pictures. These are images that tell me how I see our surreal environment. When I make movie I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination. For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected The Black Book of L., an extremely interesting experimental film that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of your successful attempt to draw the viewers through the interstitial point of the real and the imagined is the way you provided such captivating journey with autonomous aesthetics: when

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Women Cinemakers walking our readers through the genesis of The Black Book of L., would you tell us what did you attract of this story? Before moving into the movie field, my artistic experience was primarily related to theatre and the performing arts disciplines. The Black Book for L. was actually inspired by a performance from the three parts that I performed during my studies in St. Martins in London. Even then, as a performance, I wanted to grasp the various feelings through which as an audience they could experience, through tableaux vivants. Hence, this static of frames and characters acting more like dolls, and not as humans. It was an interesting process for me to translate these pictures from theatre into a film, giving me a lot of more freedom in writing the script.It is a story of the fear and love we all have in ourselves throughout our lives. From girl to adult: the same questions and doubts follow us everywhere. What excites me in every work is to search for those thin walls between dreams and life. So what is it that we dream about, and what do we actually live in reality? These two sides are never matched. This is one sequence of life, like a flashback that not only goes to our past, it is even happening in the future. Like some prediction of what we can read from our background, but also to what we experience today. Things present themselves to you, and how you choose to deal with them that reveal who you are. We all say a lot of things about who we are and how we think. But in the end it's your actions, how you respond to circumstance that reveals your character. There is a good quote by Marguerite Yourcenar "A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny."

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Ravishingly shot, The Black Book of L. features gorgeous landscape cinematography, spilling over with surreal fancies: what were your aesthetic decisions when shooting? In particular, what was your choice about camera and lens? The contradictions are something that attracts me when the aesthetics are in question.

That's the case with this film in which I am trying to face beauty and horror. What in reality can be very ugly, on the screen becomes really beautiful. I am interested in these two antipodal poles that in the eyes of viewers often cannot go together. Continuous play between these two extremes has created in me the idea to combine and make them genuine in some way

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and expressed by the camera frames. In terms of camera, we have used the Red Scarlet for the film and the Sony FS7 for some shots in slow motions. I have decided to work with digital film since I knew that there would be some visual effects in the end. In addition, when it comes to lenses, I have to say that there were a few:

mostly 24 mm, 28 mm, 35 mm and 85 mm, but also a 8 mm used as POV. As you have remarked in your director's statement, the central theme of your film is love and its cathartic process that affects our evolution as human beings: we have particularly appreciated the allegorical quality of your film and we daresay that it

brings to a new level of significance the notion of human experience. How much importance has for your direct experience as starting point of your creative process? In particular, how does daily life fuel your artistic research? It is important to listen and understand nowadays world changing. Research and walking into the uninhabitable is perhaps the right direction to get to know something about a world that is so unexplored. Each of us travels in a way that is not too offensive for us, but sometimes turning from the well-known road leads to great insights. That is why I keep my eyes open all the time: I read, absorb, develop my own aspects, explore, and travel. These are all parts of everyday life that changes us and makes us come up with new answers to persistent questions. Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s places. Of course, many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. I do. We have deeply appreciated your original approach to narrative: what was your preparation with actors in terms of rehearsal? In particular, do you like spontaneity or do you prefer to meticulously schedule every details of your shooting process? The pre-production and the shooting process are very important for me, so I love to know what I'm doing at any time of the filming. I really enjoy working on every detail and it is inspiring for me to have a precise vision and shooting plan that I develop during the preparation period. I must emphasize that it is important for me to have a detailed storyboard before the shooting itself, that each scene is planned in advance. The thought thrills me to visit locations

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A still from

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Women Cinemakers several times before filming, make tests and rehearsals with the actors, when possible in the actual shooting location. It's also important for me to leave some space for improvisation on set and I try to leave an extra time for it during the filming. It's really inspiring that journey from the idea to the realization, which by the way has always some changes at the end, especially later in the editing process. I try to make as much rehearsals as needed to establish a strong and intimate collaboration with the actors. From the visual point, The Black Book of L. is marked out with a seductive beauty that reveals a masterful amalgam of realism and dreamlike imagery, capable of walking the spectatorship to the point of convergence between reality and imagination: what are you hoping your film will trigger in the spectatorship? In particular, how much important is for you to address the viewer's imagination in order to elaborate personal associations? Without an audience, the movie does not make sense. The audience is also one aspect of the protagonists, accomplices in the creation of art. A series of sublimated feelings and images I created only as an attempt to trigger human imagination and perhaps give directions in which way all human nature can move. For audiences, this is always a liberating moment when they can elaborate their own thoughts and find their personal association within the story. My film is not only an invitation to take apart in the world of imagination and landscapes that are beautiful and anesthetized; it seems to me that it is the collective scream, pain and battle that exist in each of us. Featuring well-orchestrated tapestry of images, your film has drawn heavily from the specifics of its

environment and we have highly appreciated the way you have created such insightful resonance between the story and the scenography: how did you select the location and how did it influence your shooting process? This was perhaps one of the biggest challenges, but I was really enjoying the process of searching for the perfect locations. I am sure that in my film you could see my deeply obsession about locations and architecture and how they influensed my work. The best example is reflected in the landscapes of staircases I filmed for the movie. The staircase scene in the film is a three minutes sequence filmed in ten different staircases. Fascinated by the architectural beauty of stairs, I started this journey with a desire to discover where as humans, we could arrive. Symbolically, a staircase often holds significant meaning. In dream analysis, staircases always suggest a journey. The stairway, with its symbolism of connection both to more rarefied realities above and darker and less appealing realities below, is deeply rooted in mythology, and is a particularly resonant example of such architectural metaphors. That is why i use stairs as symbol for the universal human odyssey, representing irreplaceable landscapes of our personalities and giving us the space to go in so many contrasting directions. Sound plays an important role in the balance of The Black Book of L. And we have appreciated the way the soundtrack by Martin Aaserud provide the footage with such an ethereal and a bit unsettling atmosphere and as well as the way you have sapiently structured the combination between movement and sound: how do you see the relationship between sound and the flow of images?

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Women Cinemakers The rhythm is one of the most complex features of sound. The music was definitely central to the narrative structure. My intention was to experiment, trying to put music parts in different places to see how that changed the emotional arc of the film. Music and sound also have to be connected with the rhythm of thought that is born like the contemporary cacophony of the modern world. It is a special feature of the film that in a subtle way injects the viewer with the frequency and cadence of modern times. I have to say that I deliberately did not use the classic narrative, or language itself, so music and sound are very important elements of film narrative. It is a language that stems from a series of images, that is, the tempo that is created visually, and therefore the music itself. In fact, music and pictures are great partners in building climax and narrative peaks to the very end. It's not only an ordinary background that follows the pictures; music and sound are in my case an indispensable choreography, which results in audiovisual expression. We have deeply appreciated the originality of your artistic research and before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in cinema. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from getting behind the camera, however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. What's your view on the future of women in cinema? Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s really hard to say. While the film industry still struggles with gender inequality today, the history of early and silent cinema is filled with female producers, directors and writers, which I find strange because we are supposed to live in more progressive world right now. But, like everything else, this is changing too. I have the impression that at this moment the women are louder

and stronger, as never before. Maybe it will come a time where the positions will change and make women a kind of stronger sex. Men suddenly and surprisingly became antiheroes of our civilization, but we should not forget that one without others cannot survive. And making movies, too. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Ilaria. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? My current artistic work focuses on making experimental and poetical films that inquiry the theme of identity, journey and inner metamorphosis. As you already know that my obsessions are highly visual and aesthetical visions of world, inspired by the influential and the impressive symbolism of the scenography. And I am sure that all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself and the outside world. My latest project was the short experimental film “The Divine Way” loosely based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, which takes you into the protagonist’s epic descent through an endless labyrinth of staircases. I’m currently working on a video installation to be presented soon in Berlin and at the same time I’m writing the first two episodes of a new script, as a part of a long-term audiovisual project loosely based on Homeric “Odyssey”, as well as James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. I am fascinated by the characters and their representations from the outside that reflect their conflicts from within. It will be a really long way. That’s how I am creating. An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

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Women Cinemakers meets

Jessica Laurén Lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden

What drives me into filmmaking is the urge to tell stories. It doesn’t need to be in animation and it doesn’t even need to be in film - I can also write books, lyrics or even make comics, but I happened to stumble into animated film right after high school and I fell in love with the media though you totally create your own worlds and universes both visually, soundwise and storywise. Stories that fascinates me the most are the ones that stands with one leg in reality and one leg on some kind of fantastic level. After more or less leaving a long career as a commercial filmaker behind, I work as an independent filmmaker in all sorts of mixed techniques. I want the style to tell the same story as the script by trying out and finding designs and animation techniques that can deepen and enhance the audience’s experience of the film.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com To Garbo and Lenin is a captivating short film by Swedish director of animated film, illustrator and author Jessica Laurén: blending between historical facts and fantasy in a mixed technique, this stimulating film offers an emotionally charged visual experience, walking the

viewers through the liminal area where reality and imagination find a consistent point of convergence: we are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to Laurén's captivating and multifaceted artistic production. Hello Jessica and welcome to : we would like to introduce you to our readers with a couple of questions regarding your background. You started working with animation as a color artist right

after high school: how did this early experience with the field of moving images influence your evolution as a filmmaker? Moreover, how does your address your artistic research?

Though I left school without having any idea about what I should do afterwards, except from that I was interested in working with visual art and storytelling in some way, the opportunity to work with animation revealed a whole new world for me. I immediately embraced the idea that it was a media where you completely can build your own world from scratch and, if you wish, without any interference from anybody. If you want to move your inner landscape from inside to communicate it to the rest of the world that's the way of doing it, I thought. It was a very inspiring realization. I am a 'thinking outside the box'-person and this way of being uncompromisingly creative suits me very well. What have sort of been slowing down my own flow though, has been the fact that I directly could make a living out of working on other people's projects, mostly children movies, and later on as a director for commercials, so even if all this commission film-making has been very much skill developing for me, my own creativeness have been put aside for long times. But now is the time and I just can't stop myself! Though I know how much you can achieve with different animation designs and techniques and always seek an elevation in the visual concept I often find plain live action film forms quite boring even if there is also a intimacy in it

interview

Women Cinemakers

A still from

Women Cinemakers

interview

Women Cinemakers that is hard to get with ordinary animation - and that's why I strive to combine these two medias in different ways to get the most possible out of it. For this special edition of we have , a captivating film that our selected readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. When walking our readers through of , would you tell what did attract you of this story?

When I learned that both Garbo and Lenin due to historical facts were associated with the old department store PUB in Stockholm, she as a clerk at the hat department and he as a customer coming by, buying a suit before going home to Petrograd (St Petersburg) to initiate the October Revolution (in that same suit), it was the first time I started to think about these two icons in the same universe. Even though they were famous in the same time era they are so apart from each other in so many ways, and yet there are touch points. I wanted to create a story where these seemingly incompatible persons find each other in their unexpected similarities in a once in a lifetime moment - the only time they could possibly have met, and when they both happens to be vulnerable and struggling with the same kind of life chrisis. I also wanted to investigate their political discussions, though even if Lenin is the one who is known for his commitment to the working class movement he is an upper class twit from birth while Garbo is born pure working class, and I wanted to see how they would have dealt with that.

I was fascinated by the fact that he is going East building his career on left wing politics and she is going West seeking fame and glamour, and that they meet in the point of intersection, both geographically and in mind, where they suddenly can understand each other. Allegorically speaking one can see the story as a reminder of that we all underneath our different roles, age, gender, experiences and eventual icon statuses share the same base structure in feelings and thoughts, and even though we can appear very different from each other we can suddenly find subjects and situations that tie us together in the right moments. I think of these moments as sublime, often they appear outside ordinairy life, in situations between different permanencies. In this film it happens in a time era between old and modern values, politics, art and even fashion styles are in the change, as well as their personal lives. Further, both the ancient time perspective and the travelling theme seems magic to me, it makes the story even more like a fairy tale. Featuring stunning combination between animation technique and essential still effective cinematography is marked out with innovative narrative style that mixes visual elegance with captovating allegorical storytelling: what were your aesthetci decisions when conceiving this stimulating

interview

Women Cinemakers

interview

Women Cinemakers

film? And what were the most challenging steps during the editing process?

Though the story is a mix between facts and fiction I wanted to get a similar visual expression in the film, and I wanted to keep it in a style that represented the time era it depicts. 1917 is somewhere in between Art Nouveau and Art Deco, and I chose to use these styles to try to make something that could look like art posters in movement. And though film was the new media of the time, and also a central theme in this story, I combined this with a touch of colored silent films. I have used filmed actors against painted backgrounds, which was a good idea though a lot of the sets from old Stockholm that I wanted to use doesn't exist anymore, or are radically changed. The filmed actors where then treated in After Effects to blend in into the environment. I also put Art Nouveau outlines around them to make them even more graphic. To use animated characters in this film was never an option. It would have costed a fortune because of it's complexity and even then the result had hardly been what I wished for. The most challenging steps in the process over all (except from the financing part that is always very tiresome - but which in this case was handled fantastically by the producer Hend Aroal!) would have been to get everything right during the filming. So much to foresee, so many people to communicate to about so much, so many things that you can't control by youself - and we

only had three days for filming over 30 scenes... We filmed everything against green screen, so it was a lot of forward thinking to get everything right. Thanks to the very skilled DoP Jesper KlevenĂĽs and the other outstanding team members it worked out very well. The filming was also so much fun and very developing for my skills as a live action director! After some chaotic research for the right computor programs for opening hard drives and for editing, everything went smoothly though the editor Per Helin made a great job, and I am quite familiar with the animation/comping part and could do that by myself after my own head. In your film you leave the floor to the character of Greta Garbo and Lenin, inviting the viewers to develope between their own inner spheres and their epiphanic journeys: what was your preparation with actors in terms of rehearsal? Can you say something about the collaborative nature of your filmmaking style?

I believe in give and take. My scripts are suggestions and I am open for discussions about how to reach the desired result in the best way. Though I am quite determined in the casting process, I really trust the actors I have choosed to work with and, as long as we all know where we are heading, I gladly hear them out about the most natural way for them to deliver a line. Before the filming of 'To Garbo and Lenin' I had rehearsals with the actors, so that we all could test how the lines were working. The

interview

Women Cinemakers

interview

Women Cinemakers

feelings those lines evoke are much more important than the written sentences, and sometimes it didn't come out as expected, and we had to adjust them. Simon J Berger, who plays Lenin, is an experienced actor and had some valuable input that we took into the script, for example. Silke Varga LaurĂŠn, who plays Garbo, is my daughter and has studied acting for years, and that also turned out to be a good combination. She knows acting and we know each other beyond well. Lukas Orwin, who plays Garbo's brother, had just finished one of Swedens most renowned acting classes when we started to film. He has known Silke since childhood and they have a natural brother-sister relationship. The direction of the acting were a bit tricky, though I wanted to keep it somewhere in between natural and old fashioned. I wanted them to sound as they really were from another time, but I didn't want to lose the intimacy and the recognition. Shortly I wanted to have the cake and eat it, and I think I sort of managed somehow... We have highly appreciated the way reflects captivating blend between historical facts and fantasy, to trigger the viewers' cultural parameters addressing them to such a multilayered and unconventional visual experience. How did you

structured such stimulating results?

of your film in order to pursue

I have remained quite intuitive while shaping the storytelling. The evanescense of the short moment the characters have together is the main feeling that should enwrap the story, and I have tried not to put too much focus on other things. How much I ever would like to explain a lot of things about both Garbo's and Lenin's personal life, it has been a concious decision to just explain the minimum that's needed to make the story comprehensible and instead keep the storytelling about what is happening to them in the present. From the beginning the script was more than 30 minutes, and I had to make a decision wether to make it into a feature or to a short film. In the end it felt like the most realistic alternative was the short film, and with some help from some script advisors I managed to shorten it by half. Even if it was a nightmare full of 'kill your darlings' the story felt more dynamic and more focused afterwards. could be considered and although it speaks of the loss of a dream, it seems to convey a message of hope in the ending part of the film: would you tell us how much important is for you that the spectatorship the concepts you convey in your pieces, elaborating personal would you like your meanings? In particular, works to be understood?

We daresay that

interview

Women Cinemakers

A still from

interview

Women Cinemakers

Even though I have a clear picture of what I want to tell I always welcome the audience's personal interpretations of my work. It really gives you perspective on what you have done, and how it communicates with the audience. In the end that communication is what becomes the movie. And I love to get surprised - for example, when we showed the film in Minsk some months ago someone in the audience, after watching it, referred to Tarantino... I didn't see that one coming, but - hey, why not! we From the first time we watched have been deeeply impressed with your expressive use of animation techniques: how would you characterize your animation style? In particular, could you tell us your biggest influence and how did they affect your work?

I am getting more and more interested in mixed techniques, where you use animation and illustrations combined with film and photography though it lets you create almost whatever you want without limits. I think Wes Anderson is sort of on this track too, and I have got a lot of inspiration from Jonas Odell, one of my former executives at Filmtecknarna, though he has been pioneering in this field developing very interesting styles. But even if I get inspired by skilled people, I always try to find my own way. I guess that's why I often get to hear about this film that people haven't seen anything like it before. I like that.

While marked out with such a on the visual point, features quality: how do you consider playing within your work as a director and an animator?

I have been very disrespectful to the truth in the storytelling, but I wanted to tell a fairy tale with a 'what if...' scenario. My wish is not to try to get the audience to believe that the story actually has happened, but to get them inspired and interested in the thought meeting between these two strong characters. I like the idea of taking off in facts and reality and build up a drama from it. Making reality a bit more sparkling. And also using it to discover something new. You are also the owner of the production company Goldspoon Pictures/DessinĂŠ AB together with animation directors Jonas Dahlbeck and Boris Nawratil. Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in cinema. For more than half a century women have been from getting behind the camera, however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. What's your view on the future of women in cinema?

If I go to myself and my female colleagues it has always been obvious that the climate for female filmmakers are a lot tougher than for male dito's, but I think that the metoo movement has done a lot to open people's eyes for the power

interview

Women Cinemakers

interview

Women Cinemakers

structures we have around us. Of course we ourselves have always known that they were there, but now they are defined, we can talk about them and even men listen to us for the first time in history. And we have learned that we are not alone, we are not even a minority - we are half of the humanity! As we now can look at ourselves as a united force I think things will be going a lot faster for us in the future. At least I hope so. At least for a while. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Jessica. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

Right now I am working on a 2D-animated children movie for cinema - and at the same time I am making 'Incidents' - an animated TV series narrating women's testimonies of abuse. As you can see my work is evolving in all kinds of directions - I am not really sure were it will end up as long as the stories are worth to be told. But I would love to get to make a feature in some kind of mixed technique, just to see how it works out in a longer format.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Women Cinemakers meets

Jasmine Isdrake Lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden TIME is a multi layered experience taking place in unknown endless spaces controlled by time. Time-thieves steal our limited heartbeats and we need to take back control. Time Is My Essence. This work also taps into themes of identity, privacy and surveillance, female disembodiment and castration. My film work is influenced by my game design methods. Nonlinear movements through different worlds and levels, journeys into the in-betweens and unknowns, where time is fluid. It is also effected by my research in non-verbal communication, from dance- and musicvideo styles to cyborg implants that I have in my body. Music and technology as extension of body, used to express emotion and feel present without words.

An interview by Francis Quettier

questions around things like artificial intelligence and consciousness. It

and Dora Tennant

was always important for me to be in many different fields and channel

womencinemaker@berlin.com

out my findings through art, a science that lets me be more experimental than other sciences I work within. My cyborg art grew out of this interest

Hello Jasmine and welcome to invite our readers to visit

: we would like to in order to get a wider idea

in tech as extension of the body, and how we perceive and design architecture, transportation, fashion, skin modifications and digital avatars.

about your practice and we would start this interview with a couple of

The merging of my body and tech, and of digital and physical layers, drive

questions about your background. You have a solid training and after

much of the work I do.

your studies in the fields of media, art and archaeology: how do these experiences influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your

dued to your studies in Cognitive science,

Visualisation in architecture, art and design address your artistic research? Jasmine: Starting my academic journey in Archaeology is of value in any research I do. There I encountered the deep human need of stories and artistic expressions. From early gaming pieces and boards to labyrinths and images on rocks. Silent objects giving clues to how we interact and perceive

For this special edition of

we have selected

, an interesting video project that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at

. What has at

once captured our attention of your insightful inquiry into the elusive notion of time is the way the results of your artistic research provides the viewers with such a captivating walking our readers through the genesis of

experience. While , would you tell us

how did you develop the initial idea and what did you attract of this theme?

each other and our spaces. Film and new media studies later gave me the tools to create my own experiences. Archaeology also fueled my interest for

Jasmine: Time is something constructed, something the society I live in

technological development, and cognitive sciences fueled philosophical

has set up to control the way this society works. It is based on some kind

Women Cinemakers of factory setting that I never fitted into. Finally, partly thanks to robot coworkers this ‘normal’ living rhythm is being disrupted and people with various living rhythms and so called ‘softer’ and ‘creative’ skills are becoming valued better. Same thing with how we move in space and how architecture controls our flow. Elevators are also connected to travelling through time and spaces, and they are a reoccuring theme in my nightmares. I often have very dark and cinematographic dreams, there are many ideas for musicvideos in my archive of dream memories, but they would need a massive budget to come close to the quality needed. I had sleeping issues and nightmares all of my childhood and teenage years, I think a lot of my early visual work came from there. As a grown up I can use this inspiration in other ways, I think we can grow as persons and artist only after we have come to terms with our sufferings and moved on. At least for me it was like that, I found true peace of mind only after I turned 30 or so. I love the stability, the zen and confidence you feel after living through painful things. We need to be reminded sometimes, that our time is limited and that it is not wrong to erase toxic people and things from our lives. I always walked my own path, never cared what others thought about my appearance or choices, and I only care about peoples actions, words mean nothing without action. Partly thats is why I prefer to not use verbal communication in my films. The scene in TIME, where the main character walks through the wall of the elevator and into endless space illustrates that we have the power to tare down walls and chose our own paths. And how we also have to make sacrifices to get there, the feathers fall to the ground, nothing is easy. I need a lot of that empty space, to be alone, think, move, dance, all my ideas come there, in this cyclorama, it has to be my own. My artistic work that does not demand a team, like editing and writing, is always done in my home or in hotel rooms when I travel. I kind of always wanted to live in a dome, erase the walls. In my work I have also encountered many time-thieves, people who take your time for their own benefit without giving back, people who waste your time, and often use you like a muse, or for inspiration. People can take so much energy from you, but they also make life worth living. Human relations are far more complex than things like AI that many worry about today. I also understood that I am my own time-thief by allowing use, being afraid to say no or taking on too much of non-paid work because it is easier to help others than get your own things done. So the characters in TIME are essentially the same one, it is a fight within. Something that really resonated with me was the words of a researcher in physics, being interviewed for one of the games/interactive documentaries I

Women Cinemakers worked on, called Axion. Something along the lines of We only have a limited amount of heartbeats, what are you going to do with them? TIME is also inspired by a cyborg implant that I carry under a heart tattoo on my chest, there is a chip linking to an x-ray video of my heart, and a countdown of an estimated number of heartbeats that I have left. Just like TIME this piece expresses an intimacy, a kind of exposed skin. It is a near field communication chip so you have to scan it within 5 cm, a metaphor for how tech can bring people closer and provide an alternative way to express emotion for those who might not do that verbally. Elegantly shot and marked with such a brilliant cinematographic quality, features careful attention to blocking with keen eye to details: what were your when shooting and editing? In particular, what was your choice about camera and lens? Jasmine: Every person involved in this film has a special quality to their work and personal presence, and I hope we will have the opportunity to work on a bigger project together in the future. This is a zero-budget film so I did not have the benefit of choosing cameras, I am used to not having the tech I would want. I have also worked in companies that have all the tech you would ever wish for, but zero creativity, and then the tech becomes empty and uninteresting. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just gear. But of course I would like to have both some day. TIME was shot when my younger brother made one of his school films. He studied in Poland and his classmates and team stayed in my apartment for a couple of days while we worked on our projects in Sweden. So we used the cameras they had for the school film, and we shot half the scenes in a film studio in Sweden where we both spent much time in our careers. The other half, the elevator, is the entrance to my apartment building. We only had a few hours spread over two days to film everything, so I am very grateful for our 6 person team who are all pros. The lead actor, Adrianna Janowska Moniuszko, was a perfect fit for this role and I love how her facial expressions communicate everything perfectly. The two cinematographers, Filip Lyman and Anders Hoft, share my taste in the visual, both studied at the film school in Lodz which I find holds very high quality in film training. Specifically in cinematography, and the yearly Camerimage festival for cinematographers is based in Poland too. Nothing in Sweden is even close and I rarely work with this kind of work here. It is very practical to live in Sweden, but artistically it absolutely kills me. Me and my brother are partly polish and grew up with war stories told by our grandmother who survived both nazism and communism, and raised four kids by herself after losing her husband and their company. There is a darkness and a powerful strength on every wall and door I see when walking on the streets in Poland, it effects and inspires me. We worked with

Women Cinemakers perspectives I often use, tunnels and endlessness, narrow and open, I want the cameras to dance, extend beyond the frames and give the viewer several frames to dive into. There is a rhythm and movement in my esthetics, eyes, hands and covered mouths. I can look at clips from films like In the mood for love, over and over again, I do not even care about the love story, I just stare at the artistic choices and perfectionism in how every detail matches, the slow movement of a swinging soupcan, matching the swinging of a lamp and the earring of the actor, how a dress matches the shadows from a window, patterns and multiple frames, dreamlike color and light compositions. This kind of art takes hard work and time, it takes strong teamwork and tons of patience. Even though we did not have much time and resources for TIME, I wanted to go back to this slowness and feel in the craft of making film. Trying to make art that is not mainstream has always been stressful, it is all about not having money or time, you rarely get a chance to focus on your vision. Actors who are part of my films are there because of their feel, not their looks or training, I never have ordinary castings, I find that stuff awful. I have forced myself to castings and drama classes a few times, as part of my work is to understand others. I do that through performance art and going outside of my comfort zones. My entire body screams inside but I try to block it, after experiencing castings on that side I never want to put anyone through that. Most of the actors I have worked with are serendipitous encounters, friends, or friends of friends. You just feel it when it's the right connection. I am a perfectionist when it comes to details and have shouted cut during shooting because a single hair was shining a tiny bit on the actors face, or because a pattern on a surface was disturbing. I also took courses in photography, light design, fashion and film make-up which makes it easier to understand and communicate with teams. In TIME my own clothes and fashion I made are used, like the masks and the Neuro dress you see in the first studio scene. I knitted the dress for a costume contest and exhibitions in 2011 when I got interested in wearables, it has a soundtrack that I recorded and remixed from actual neurons communicating in a human body. The masks are part of a life long project and have been used in many performances, video installations and collaborations with artists, dancers, freerunners and skaters. We have highly appreciated the images of your film: your approach to

nature of the flow of challenges

the viewers' perceptual parameters, urging them to reconsider their own condition of constantly evolving beings. How did you structured TIME in order to pursue such stimulating outcome? Were you particularly interested in triggering the viewer's perceptual parameters in order to address them to

Women Cinemakers elaborate personal interpretations? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? Jasmine: I wanted to create an illusion of endless space and time. Give the viewer space for self reflection and to wander off in their mind. Since I am also a game designer my creative thinking is used to stories with multiple choices and levels, chronologies that often can be disrupted by a player. As a contrast of being restless and often fast paced, I also wanted to make this slow, and repetitive, give space to feel the rhythms. I hate when people think that there is one truth to everything, one box to tick, one category, when someone says that they do not get the meaning of a film or art work like there is one specific meaning or answer to everything. It is a bit like the theme of dark matter we used in Axion. We do not know what dark matter or energy is yet, it is scary and exciting, there is space for so many thoughts and questions. My works are open, I want to open doors, but people need to walk through them by their own choice, it is up to you how you navigate this world we live in. I want people to own their own thoughts, own their time, take their space, take responsibility for their actions, be free. This is nothing we just get, and it is easy to lose, we need to fight for it. Minimalistic and at the same time mesmerizing in its ethereal qualities, the sound tapestry by Marconi Union provides the footage of TIME with such a dreamlike and unsettling atmosphere: how do you consider the role of sound within your practice and how do you see the relationship between sound and the flow of images? Jasmine: Music and movement is the essence of my life, I feel it more than I listen to it, my emotions are channeled through it and it can almost take control of my being. Since I was born I have been highly sensitive to sound, but also do not like silence, I need music around me 24/7. It was interesting how I encountered Marconi Union. I saw an article about their work with neuroscientists when they created an album that could lower anxiety and stress. It felt connected with my work and I started listening to their other albums too. While I started editing TIME there was this rhythm in the background as I played music in the other room. It was like heartbeats and they matched my frames while cutting through the material. I checked the playlist and the name of the album was Tokyo+. This had another connection for me too as Tokyo was on the top of my Places to visit before I die - list, and one year earlier I had been forced to cancel my travel there because I got very ill. This illness took away my

Women Cinemakers

ability to move and dance, my wings were cut off and I could do nothing about it. Luckily only for 6 months or so, then I learned to walk again. Dance has been an important part of my life just like music. When I work with a camera or when I edit, it is almost like dancing for me. My films are often like musicvideos and I use audio that is not verbal. The TIME theme and the Marconi Union album was a match, there were heartbeats, clocks ticking, and a sense of travelling through tunnels in the Red Line 12am piece, so I immediately bought the album and contacted the band. As soon as I got approval to use the music the flow of my editing merged with those rhythms. It was a perfect match, a dance. And I went to Tokyo a few weeks after the film was done. We daresay that could be considered an effective allegory of human condition in our unstable, convulsive contemporary age and as you have remarked in your director's statement, your film also taps into themes of identity, privacy and surveillance, female disembodiment and castration: does your artistic research respond to

cultural moment or do your think that your

practice could be in a certain sense disconnected from our time? Jasmine: Since my education spans over the entire human timeline, I actually also studied some geology but did not take the Bachelor because I was not allowed to mix art into my thesis…. so the timeline is crazy long before humans even entered, and then reading about things like dark matter and superintelligence makes it hard to know anything or understand what time we are in now. It’s like I have knowledge of many parallel worlds but at the same time know nothing at all and try to navigate by creating rather than consuming, prototyping rather than writing or theorising. I feel privileged for being old enough to know what was before the web and the playstations, but sad that I will not live long enough to see the results of what we are developing today, or the equality fights that will make life more equal. Put into categories like woman, cyborg, tattooed, artist etc. there is some baggage to carry and I have been exotified since I was born, it did not matter if I had long blond hair or curly black hair, I was objectified, and when I lost my hair and tattooed my head I thought it would change, I was wrong. Looking at how women are represented in media, bodies without heads or brains, boys fantasies and so on, is still crazy. And if you’re the ‘strong woman’ stereotype, then you become intimidating and a threat instead. Being a woman with what is considered masculine behavior, especially in tech industries has been an absolutely ridiculous experience. There is an immaturity and several biases in those industries that are shocking for artists who often come from more diverse and open minded contexts. At film festivals it was often taken for granted that I was an actor/model and not a

Women Cinemakers

director, and at game festivals women are often treated like they are invisible when men always turn to the male developers in the room. Women are generally placed in admin, care taking or producer roles, never allowed in the creative lead roles. You constantly have to prove yourself, even when your track record is ten times longer than your male colleagues, and other women are not exactly helping. In the game industry I have been told to watch my tone, I have been the killjoy and I became a threat and men feel castrated when you play on their level. It has been good to see how the recent years media attention to those issues are now changing the game. The knitted gasmasks you see in TIME grew out of my work with identity and avatars and they connect with many themes. Partly war and pollution, and I looked through old archives of different gasmasks and recreated them in soft materials and bright colors. I also put sensors inside that measured humidity from breathing or turned on LED lights. I worked with dancers in public areas, like Times Square in New York or an art faire in Dubai. Wearing a mask or seeing a person with a mask is very special and uncanny, just like digital avatars can be uncanny. As we start living in more mixed realities identification becomes important and at the same time surveillance can be misused. There is a very complex balance here where peoples security must be placed first. In TIME the masks and the feathers represent castration of voice and wings, power and freedom. Our society is ruled by the loudest voices, those who can express themselves well with words. I had a violent childhood, and being neurodiverse I also had a very complex relation to touch and verbal expressions. This gave me a superpower, or a weakness, depending on how you look at it. I had a calmness inside of me, a hard shell on the outside that protected my inside and did not show any pain or weakness outwards. My entire body could scream inside but not a single sound could come out of my mouth, it could be a devastating feeling in many situations. I did almost not speak at all until I got into my twenties, but I learned by hanging around a lot of friends from different backgrounds, and even took a few singing classes just to learn how to use my voice. If I get very tired I can still lose my ability to speak sometimes, it is like I get this thick, painful stone in my throat, similar to when you cry hard. The masks I design always have this big mouth piece blocking the mouth, and they have big holes for the eyes showing that the bearer sees very clearly, they see through you. Powerful without a word. The technology that I use as material in my art made it possible for me to communicate and express emotion in alternative ways. I consider my work very physical and intimate, even though me as a person can seem very emotionless and cold. This is the thing with art, we can create awareness around people's differences and the beauty of our diversity. We filmed the elevator scenes in TIME with two different sets of clothes for the lead character. One masculine suit similar to the one the other character is

Women Cinemakers

wearing, and the female coat I chose to keep at the end. The switching between the exposed, masked and maskless skins and the covered suit and coat, represent the diversity within each person, we are not one gender, one category. Categories, just like time, are made up, and those are very much depending on and connected to the specific time and culture we live in. So in the end, my work is disconnected and connected to our time. Over the years you have curated tech events with a large number of participants, bringing game and maker culture to the public: technology can be used to create innovative works, but innovation means not only to create works that haven't been before, but especially to recontextualize what already exists: do you think that the role of the artist has changed these days with the new global communications and the new sensibility created by new media? Jasmine: The term innovation has been so overused in superficial contexts the last years that it almost lost its meaning. The events I curated were more about empowerment, about making new tech accessible and about bringing diversity into technical development. There are huge problems in the film and tech industries today because the development teams were not diverse and equal. An example is face recognition software that has trouble reading darker skin tones. Another example is discrimination against cyborgs. Filmmakers also have responsibility when it comes to how different creatures are represented. I am tired of experiencing the same stories and stereotypes over and over again. I am tired of discussions like, AR is better than VR, or VR is dead. It is not about that. Creators choose the materials and methods that best fit their intentions, and the person experiencing the creation chooses the platform of their preference when possible. Artist used digital tools like VR long before the hype we saw in recent years, and yes tech is getting better and cheaper, which is good, and no digital culture is not taking over â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;traditionalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; art or crafts, it just widens the palette and increases inclusion. When internet became accessible I saw it as a freedom tool, my work would not be possible without it, or at least it would be extremely boring growing up in a small town in Sweden. My dad was

Women Cinemakers

an engineer so I had access to computers and internet in early. I remember when the first home gaming consoles came and when we got more than 2 channels on TV. Then in the nineties, usually girls were excluded from tech, we went out to clubs instead, with fake IDs, while boys our age stayed inside continuing to play games and learning more about computers. This is a generalisation, but it had a negative impact on the tech industries today. I incorporated new media in my art as soon as I got access to the tools to do so. I studied web design in the nineties and created one of my many self-portraits as a digital avatar. Most artists go through this early stage of finding self, turning yourself inside out, exposing and criticising, doubting. When I studied photography in high school, Cindy Sherman was an influence when we had to do portraits. I played with my identity and appearance in that way too, but more as performance than photography. The changes I made to my skins were often permanent, like tattoos and scarifications, I have learned to tattoo and burn patterns myself. Kafkas Metamorphosis and the robot toys Transformers were also influences in the way I re-contextualise myself and my work, there is no line between the two, just like there is no line between tech and humans. We create the lines, the walls, ourselves, change is constant and we should embrace it, not fear it. I have tried making stone tools, I loved hammering iron with Iron Age methods, I made clothes and I tested painting, sculpting, coding etc. New or old tech is just a tool, I chose what I like to do and that is directing audiovisual art and interactivity. Often this work has effects that can improve parts of society, like VR in healthcare, or games for learning, but the responsibility to save society is often placed too much on artists, and things like gentrification is also connected to how artists are misused in urban cultural planning. We need to equalise the way resources and responsibilities are distributed, new global communications give us better tools to do so and to share resources. Serbian performance artist Marina AbramoviÂ once remarked the importance of not just making work but ensuring that itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s seen in the right place by the right people at the right time: how is in your opinion online technosphere affecting by the audience? Do you think that today is easier

to a

particular niche of viewers or that online technology will allow artist to extend to a broader number of viewers the interest towards a particular theme? Jasmine: That is very true, that the room in which you show your art will make all the difference, specially when it comes to recognition and monetary capital. For good, and bad. I would say that it is more important to stay true to your artistic development, quality and fearlessness, which this artist in particular has proved better than most. More or new tools does not necessarily make things easier, it is however easier to reach further and consume more now, it is also easier to disappear in large amounts of data. Personally I

Women Cinemakers have no issues with massive information flows, but I see how many people do, and I think we need not limit this, but get better at navigating it, better at source criticism and get better awareness of what is happening outside of our microworlds. I think the terms online/offline are outdated, but what I really like is when artists like Abramovi or Sherman use platforms like VR or Instagram as it improves the quality of what people are exposed to in those newer platforms. It's important to mention that you are also the founder of the

, a global

design collective and studio for game and film innovation: how do you consider the collaborative nature of your practice? In particular, can you explain how a work of art demonstrates communication between several creative minds? Jasmine: Collaboratory grew out of a need for diverse, non-categorising spaces, and issues I encountered in my life as an entrepreneur, problems I saw in society in general. I always existed in spaces inbetween, in the unknow, the unfamiliar, the misfit, and that is where I will stay, anything else would be boring and predictable. I never had access to places and resources like MIT or Black Mountain College, and universities here were extremely siloed and limiting for my transdisciplinary interests. The art world is far behind in Sweden, digital culture is discriminated in the culture funds. Art institutions and money is controlled by the same people, often with backgrounds in theatre, painting etc. or without any experience in art and what it takes to live like an entrepreneur. At the same time people in Europe have a lot of privilege and freedom compared to many other places, just by owning a passport my life is so much easier than for many people I have met in my lab, who wait for years to get the right papers. I traveled and started over so many times, even though it was never easy it was possible, I had my freedom to choose. Part of Collaboratory was to take social responsibility, to create this freedom of choice for all people, and we used art to do so. And we succeeded, least on a small scale. We were before our time, so it was hard to sustain economically. I wanted to work on bigger film and game productions and by sharing resources and gather skills at one place I thought this could be possible. I did not see how we would become a threat instead, because we built what tax funded institutions are supposed to build but fail with because they are not community driven, they care about their prestige more than about people. By its open design Collaboratory became many other things, like an alternative school for kids with NPF, a social context and in some cases a new family for refugees, a lab for citizen driven city planning, a prototyping workshop... I wanted a freezone for people to collaborate, make tech accessible and diverse, share workshops, tools, office and exhibition space. Build a game industry, bring film and game culture closer, so that people could work on bigger productions and understand each others needs and methods better. I saw a need for new business models and disruption of power structures and the way ‘hard’ values are always valued more than ‘soft’, numbers over matter, material over immaterial. By better

Women Cinemakers collaborations we are changing this. I love the combination of collaborating with people in open settings, synapses back and forth, energy and passion, and total introvert thinking at home alone. A film or a game is often the result of several creative minds collaborating towards a common vision, the rewards of seeing a finished work after hard and frustrating teamwork is priceless. Sharing that experience creates lifetime bonds of friendship, and I am eternally grateful for the journey the Collaboratory community shared together and all the things we proved possible. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Jasmine. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Jasmine: I have a transmedia project in development, a bigger storyworld including a feature film and AAA game. Hope to be able to scale up my work and have proper budgets so that I can focus on creative work more than on surviving and paying rent. I have to live in a different context for that to happen so I am currently looking for a city to move to, and work on storyboarding and scripts while doing that. I am also working on possibilities to franchise the Collaboratory model globally and finding the right partners. There is also hours of footage waiting to be edited on my computers, several short art house films, short docs and video game installations. I see my work constantly evolving and maturing, and I desperately need peace in terms of a home to be able to focus now. I see my cyborg art and interfaces becoming more advanced, it is still simple, what I call gaffer tape level, and one of my projects is about building an AI co-creator. My curiosity was always stronger than any fears, I do not even understand how I got my cyborg implants and other body mods, I hate needles and my entire body chivers just by thinking of the process. But I know that I am only in the beginning of something, there is a lot of work ahead, and I will work on never losing that curiosity and crazy imaginence.

TIME Team Info Director / Production Designer / Editor Music Actors Cinematographers Production Assistant (Camera: Canon 5D mk3)

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Ana Clara Molinari Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

I think of my work as the dialectics between organic and inorganic matter. Often referencing Romanticism and German Expressionism among other contemporary influences, my work questions the mental structure of humans among today’s technological society. My scenarios are dreamlike, inviting the viewer to participate in its meaning. It is all arranged to display conflict and I often choose the use of collage so I can convey rupture from content to form. I believe collages provide a feeling of unease and loss of naturalness, allowing the editing technique to stand as a physical reference to the dialectic expression of the work contents. I aim to capture life as a reflection, life as a dream.

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urges the spectatorship to walk the viewers through the thin line that divide reality and the imagination. We are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her multifaceted artistic production.

Fall of Sun is a captivating video collage installation by Berlin based multidisciplinary artist Ana Clara Molinari: featuring effective combination between emotionally charged images and captivating soundtrack, Fall of Sun challenges the viewers' perceptual parameters addressing them to question our conflictual and unbalanced relationship with environment. One of the most interesting aspects of Molinari's work is the way it

Hello Ana Clara and welcome to WomenCinemakers: we would like to introduce you to our readers with a couple of questions regarding your background. You have a solid formal training you hold a Bachelor's degree focused in Cinematography and Film/Video production, that you received from Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP). How did this experience inform your

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evolution as an artist? Moreover, how would you describe the influence that your cultural substratum due to your Brazillian roots has on your general vision on art? Hello and thank you for having me here! Well, my Bachelor degree on Cinematography helped me a lot to understand what kind of artist I wanted to become. I mean, it was through Film School that I became aware of the immense possibilities within the media of film and video. At the end of my degree I worked more towards an experimental form of cinema, which I guess wouldn't have come naturally for me without the deeper understanding of film making that I acquired in school. In my work I tend to explore a lot about environment issues and I guess this is what relates to Brazil the most. We are a country with a beautiful and rich nature, but unfortunately those in political or economical power have been deforesting so much of our ecosystem and of course the consequences are devastating for nature and so many communities. Right after I finished writing the ideas for Fall of Sun, on November 2015, a terrible environmental disaster happened in the State of Minas Gerais on a city called Mariana. We call it: A Tragédia de Mariana - “The Mariana’s Tragedy”. Two immense mining dams ruptured which caused many cities to be submerged in mud. 39,2 million m³ of industrial and mineral waste have crossed all of the Doce’s river basin, that’s approximately 663 km of river and 1.469 hectare of forest that were poisoned by heavy metal. Needless to say everything died. People and countless animals and a whole biodiversity were extinguished in days. It was so brutal to see the rivers as red as I had imagined in my story… unfortunately it was not as fictional as I had thought. And it is essential to say that these kind of

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“accidents” happen because environmental protection laws are either non-existence or neglected and overlooked. If you are a powerful company you can just buy your way and basically nothing will happen to you. Unfortunately another mining disaster has become public this February. A Norwegian mining company called Hydro Alunorte has been illegally dropping mineral waste through clandestine pipes directly into Amazon’s river beds in the city of Bacarena, Pará. Bacarena’s community leader, Paulo Sérgio Almeida Nascimento, 47, who fiercely reported the company environmental crimes, was found dead this 12 of march. Until now, nobody was either considered a suspect nor arrested. You are a versatile artist and your practice is marked out with such captivating interdisciplinary approach that allows you to range from film, mixed media and videoart. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to our readers to visit https:// www.anaclaramolinari.com in order to get a synoptic idea about your artistic production: in the meanwhile, would you tell us what does address you to such captivating interdisciplinary approach? How do you select a medium in order to explore a particular theme? I guess it’s more of a intuitive approach for me. Most of the times it starts with an image in my head and usually it’s a very detailed scenery that I imagine. All the colours, textures, forms and specially the overall feeling of the scene. It is always very hard work to try to make up all the pieces together and create a story out of this single imagined frame. And then it becomes clear the type of media that it belongs in… If it is a narrative story, a film would be more suitable, but if I have in mind something more of an aesthetic experience, I tend to explore collages, 3d objects and short videos.

But there are times when I consciously choose to explore certain technique, like for example 3d, and the whole process starts from a desire to explore the medium’s technical possibilities. It is always a very unpredictable process, you never know what kind of object you’ll end up creating.

dialectic expression of contradictory objects, addresses the viewers to explore the thin line between reality and imagination. When walking our readers through the genesis of Fall of Sun, would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea?

For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected Fall of Sun, a captivating video collage installation that has at once captured our attention for the way it features such stimulating inquiry into the

Fall of Sun is an experimental video collage that was designed to be a overview of a dreamlike scenario where it’s essence lies on the encounter of organic and inorganic forms. The dialectics comes as a reference to human and nature

condition amongst environmental issues present in our time. The project started with a desire to look into image collage on a video form, and a shattered scenario image I had in my head. At that point I felt like I had good technical knowledge for creating digital collages in which I had acquired through the process of producing a collage series entitled "Body Portraitsâ&#x20AC;?. The whole technical process with Fall of Sun was very demanding. It was a very slow process as well. I first started working on the collage landscape and from there a

kind of narrative story was shaped. I guess all of the broken scenario from Fall of Sun came to be because I was going through a very difficult time in my life, and all I could think of was ruined pieces of existence on a background. We have appreciated the way Fall of Sun walks the viewers to a surreal and dystopian journey through sapient dreamlike narrative: in particular, we like your effective use of images riches with symbolic values, as gas masks and smokestaks, that make the viewer aware

of the fact that what seems to be an imaginary dystopia is not far from reality. How much importance have metaphors in your practice as a collagist and in particular how much important is for you to trigger the viewer's perceptual parameters in order to address them to elaborate personal associations? Yes, I tend to use a lot of metaphors and visual analogies. I think itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a way of expressing something in a more subtle dimension. I think subtle narratives makes the whole cinematic experience richer in the sense that it demands the audience to remain active in a constant search for meaning. The soundtrack of Fall of Sun provides the film with such uncanny atmosphere and we have highly appreciated the way you have sapiently structured the combination between sound and moving images in order to communicate a feeling of unease and loss of naturalness. How did you structure the editing process in order to achieve such stimulating results? And how do you see the relationship between sound and moving images? Just like the visual part of the project, the sound was also thought out to convey rupture. Lucas Petti, who is our Sound Designer, did that by creating layers and single fragments of audio that were distributed along the horizontal pan through the use of bursts and breaking points. For example on the ocean scene, we have a repetitive image for a reasonable time. During this time the sound design alone took the leading part on moving forward with the storytelling. Sound is a very very powerful tool. This reminds me of the last film we saw on the movies: â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Killing of a Sacred Deerâ&#x20AC;?, by

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Yorgos Lanthimos. I really liked that movie and the use of sound is splendid. What we see in movies like this is what can be achieved with the right use of sound. Even when the images onscreen are rather mundane, you can create a well stablished suspense scene just with sound design. Fall of Sun reflects the encounter of organic and inorganic forms and as you have remarked once it refers to human and nature condition amongst environmental issues present in our time: what could be in your opinion the role of Art in order to sensitive the viewers about some particular themes in our unstable contemporary age? I can’t really say what’s the role of Art in our contemporary age, but I definitely understand art as a medium of abstract expression and I think it definitely serves me as a way to explore my own sensitivity. In that sense, Art has an imaginary and intimate quality that I certainly believe can successfully be used as an engaged political tool for communicating and educating. Fall of Sun deviates from traditional video making to enhance the expressive potential of the images and the symbols that you included. How was the editing process and what were your aesthetic decisions? I think when exploring environmental and social-economic problems you inevitably talk about conflict and when conflict is addressed the presence of “rupture” embraces your story from start to end. I chose the use of the collage because I wanted to convey rupture from content to form. Collages ultimately provide a feeling of unease and loss of naturalness, so the editing

technique stands as a physical reference to the dialectic expression of the work contents. Your work features such a stylistically balanced combination between traditional techniques of collage and modern digital technologies. We are sort of convinced that new media will bridge the apparent dichotomy between art and technology that Art and Technology are soon going to assimilate each other. What's your opinion about the relationship between Art and Technology? In particular, how is in your opinion technology affecting the consumption of art by the audience? I really like this saying from Harun Farocki: “Reality will soon cease to be standard by which to judge the imperfect image. Instead, the virtual image will become the standard by which to measure the imperfections of reality”. In a digital society, where technology shapes our perception in everyday life, our impression of Art is inevitably altered. From the way art is produced to how it is perceived by the public. New technologies bring a lot of amazing possibilities to the art making, like Virtual and Augmented Reality for example. I think VR will become very present in our storytelling tool box, because it enables full immersion while overcoming physical constraints. Of course there’s a big downside to all of this. I am mostly worried about human psyche among a scenery where the notion of physical and digital becomes identical. I have to say it’s not a good feeling that comes to mind. One of the hallmarks of your practices is the ability to establish direct involvement with the viewers, who urged to

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evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. So before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception? And what do you hope to trigger in the spectatorship? Well, my intention is to reach people through a more sensitive approach. I like to create a set of image and sound that evokes people’s imagination and that it gives them space to assign their own meaning and understanding of things. I am really passionate about subtleness in cinema. I guess I’ve learnt that through Ingmar Bergman’s work, my most favourite director and inspiration. By never delivering evident meaning to his scenes and characters, he constantly demands the audience to participate and interpret. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Ana Clara. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Thank you so much for having me! I am currently writing my next short film. It’s called “Heidi’s Window” and it will be a project that also blends live action film with a lot of digital assets, like collages and 3d. Different from Fall of Sun, it will be a story with a solid shooting script and a more narrative approach. I also plan to start exploring my performance abilities through singing and acting and I hope I can evolve my work around that. I want to start exploring more that side of my self.

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Christina Lykoka Lives and works in Athens, Greece.

There are many aspects an artist could cover but I think that on first thought, a significant first step when approaching on an area of research and observation of choice, is to have the ability to pull out and make the essence emerge and subsequently work on translating it through the art medium it into something tangible. I believe that this process is a relationship that can work as an honest ‘snapshot’ of the moment in time it exists. Whatever then the initial intent may be, it is still possible to envision anything underway to be an instance of truth. I do not think that one strives to only make interesting inventions; the minute one can observe that the way life itself is constructed is extremely abundant, more so in the recognition of the fact that we may have accepted certain realities as self-evident, leaves plenty of room for exploration of all of what already exists. One can expand this with an orange fruit for example, which is a result of a certain process, containing many stages like the sowing of the seed, a stage that can be observed, identified interpreted and ultimately challenged. I believe one can translate this example to science, ideas, social issues, public perception and so on. I appreciate drawing from these interesting concepts, which often have no clear-cut conclusion. Shifting between different elements and diverse ‘realities’ like a back and forth that works as a locomotive pushing the discussion forwards or ‘somewhere’. A process that is exciting and at times cathartic. My aspiration(s) is to advance into more interactive arrangements so that ‘experiences’ can be formed. I aim to work with diverse methods of expression, observe the way one method sometimes ‘cancels’ the other, and ultimately produce dynamic environments. Experiment in other words with a mathematician’s ‘nightmare’, the infinite.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Hello Christina and welcome to we would start this interview with a couple of

questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and you graduated from the Technological Educational Institute of Central Macedonia: how did this experience inform your current practice as an experimental filmmaker?

Moreover, how does your due to your Greek roots direct your creative decisions? Despite the fact that my undergraduate years were based on a different field than the one I am in at the moment, a not insignificant part of my approach in literal research, sketch making, drawings, materials and visual composition was developed and nurtured during that time. As far as my Greek origins are concerned, I find it nearly impossible to accurately discern and pinpoint which elements play their part in my creative choices because I think that this process probably works on a subconscious level. So, if one adds to that my choice in avoiding aspects that are specific to my upbringing or nationality, identifying the work in such terms is almost impossible. However, when you get the chance to view your work after you have taken a certain amount of time away from it, these moments can be found. For this special edition of we have , a captivating film selected that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention to your sapient narrative style is the way it provides the viewers with such an intense visual experience, enhanced by elegant composition. While walking our readers through of , would you tell how did you develop the initial idea? In particular, do you like spontaneity or do you prefer to meticulously

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of your editing process?

Death of The Blackbird is based on a book I purchased on the used items stall from a street kiosk quite a few years ago. I knew there was something to it, but it was one of these things you leave out for “later”. It is the product of Giorgos Theocharis, one from one of the most unknown and underappreciated writers in Greek literal history I have ever encountered. I started intensively reading the book during the winter of 2016 and re-starting it over and over again. The book’s tone, unusual form, and profound sincerity made me gradually realize that this book should be made into a visual project. It essentially consists of a disparate group of moments, short sub-stories, recollections, unexplained events, struggles, and realizations. There is no linear narrative or real story arc here, it is what amounts to a “captive” man’s diary whose identity and status is not important or given. It was incredibly hard to figure out how to touch this text and make it into a visual piece, it literally took months to even get a feel of what I should be using and how it should be presented, a process that essentially ended when I basically said: “Ok, here’s where I stop”. In terms of my approach when editing, I would like to take my cue from what I expressed before: This project was very difficult to work on due to its chaotic nature. I don’t think that there ever was a question of being spontaneous vs. calculated, I fought with what worked really, going back and forth between planning, designing, revising and haphazardly deleting stuff on the spot or adding new material without really thinking about it much.

Elegantly shot, features stunning cinematography and from a visual point, we have been fascinated with your clear and effective approach to narrative: what were your to achieve such powerful outcome? My goal was to strike a balance between very different visual elements coming from live-action footage and animated parts using different techniques ranging from traditional hand-drawn rotoscope and 2d/3d animation. I am of the belief that this mixture of different approaches worked due to the nature of the underlying text and the tone I wanted to employ coming naturally from the sense I got from it. As such what resulted didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t necessarily fall under one specific medium of expression, on the contrary, the medium was chosen to serve the needs of the piece. Marked out with a seductive beauty on a visual aspect, addresses the viewers to a wide number of narratives and we daresay that the desire for understanding that pervades it could be considered an effective allegory of human experience: would you tell us how much important is for you that the spectatorship rethink the concepts you convey in your pieces, elaborating personal meanings? How open would you like your works to be understood? I think what drives this work is not only that personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s struggling desire for truthfulness but also the magnifying glass that goes on in the underlying structure of the human

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Women Cinemakers condition. It is not easy to define a work that came from one’s own effort, but that I find it important that the work has the ability to evoke and engage someone into thinking certain things through, or even to solely react emotionally to its presence in some way one finds significant, transcending beyond the immediate aesthetic level which is partially there to frame certain things. I find that the way one understands and perceives things differs from another, as such I’m of the opinion that the experience should be taken as openly and subjectively as possible, I really want my work(s) to initiate some kind of interaction, not dictation. features Elegantly composed, stunning landscape cinematography and we daresay that each shot is carefully orchestrated to work within the overall structure: what were your aesthetic decisions that informed your process? Firstly, I thank you for the kind words on my work! I started by using as many reference points as possible, rummaging through old photographs, archival footage, historical moments, things I shot with my camera two or four years ago and a host of other things that I find impossible to remember at this moment. I also “hunted” for ways to creatively alter footage or photographs as to establish a baseline aesthetic in order to have the ability to employ that as an adjoining factor between different elements. I then shot plenty of footage on which I tried following an instinctive and “non deliberate” approach exactly because nothing in the underlying tone of this work wants to establish anything concrete, it is more of a free flow of states.

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within your process? Another interesting work that we would like to introduce to our readers is entitled : both realistic and marked out with a dreamlike quality, this video reveals an exquisite eye for the details and breathtaking editing style, to walk the viewers into a dystopian and visionary adventure. We daresay that this video attempts to unveil the invisible that pervades our reality but that cannot be detected by our sensorial experience. Do you agree with this interpretation? Moreover, how do you consider

I think that it is quite on the spot especially in certain elements of the project’s flow, I find that from the perspective of this specific work, there really isn’t a distinction between reality and imagination because these definitions do not really apply here. Everything exists at the same time and is happening whether we see it or not, I would point to such things as the “Double Slit” scientific experiment and the co-existence of the wave and particle property of light, going as far as to the more

‘tangible’ social aspects of life in general that seem to exhibit similar properties. It is a realization that was preceded by lengthy discussions on the (in)significance of humanity and a question of whether it was possible to create something that is not perceived from the human standpoint. It is difficult to record all the invisible dynamics covering all aspects of human, global and cosmological activity, they are all there though. Your practice deviates from traditional videomaking

relationship between to question the everyday life's experience and the digital realm. Especially in relation to your editing decision, how do modern digital technologies affect your creative process? Technology is part of the working man’s toolbox, it’s there to assist, enhance and make certain workloads more effective. Going beyond that, technology also sometimes dictates aesthetics in surprising and occasionally obvious ways, it can quite easily lead you into using elements “imposed” by the tool vs one’s own

thought and aesthetic wants, I believe some balance needs to be struck between what one wants to do and what is readily available in front of them, a balance that I think is only found when you are able to master your craft as much as possible. Sound plays a crucial role in your works: both and feature such captivating ambiance due to the effective synergy between gorgeous images and immersive audio commentary by Gregory Patrick Karr. How did you develop the narrative structure and the balance between sound and the flow of images? Sound and music in any form or shape is a crucial part of what drives me internally so it is only natural that this aspect would translate into my work. Finding the balance between sound, music, narration, and imagery is for a huge part highly instinctive for me. However, calculation and detailed thinking come from figuring out seemingly small things such as how prominent or subdued certain items are on the sound-scape and consulting with the edited material to get my cues. I think it’s important here to denote that I find it very useful in my process to begin by creating a sound “veil” as a starting point and work from that by adding elements such as effects and short musical themes. The difficult part is deciding on what the “veil” should be! I then introduced the heavily edited and revised recorded narration in both projects creating the sound-scape even though I thought differently about it

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Women Cinemakers at first. Gregory’s voice-work on both projects and Stathis Diamantidis’ upright bass free-associative playing on Death of The Blackbird were crucial and complemented the process with their creative presence. has been recently selected for AnimateCologne- Now And After Video Art Festival and Athens Animfest and for the 14th Athens Digital Arts Festival 2018: how much importance has for you that you receive in the festival circuit? And how do you feel previewing a film before an audience? It is incredibly important, the festival people (attendees and organizing committees) are passionate and keenly interested in the art form and as such their eyes affixed to one’s work. There’s a duality here, on one hand, you might feel scrutinized\ looked at with a magnifying glass and on the other, you experience the joy of having your work presented to an audience that wants to give it a clean shot. I find both aspects extremely useful and productive. Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in cinema. For more than half a century women have been from getting behind the camera, however, in the last decades, there are signs that something is changing. What's your view on the future of women in cinema? I am optimistic, my personal experience has been that there’s active and substantial engagement from women in visual arts in general and it’s only growing. I have recently

witnessed extraordinary work coming from women. Artists for which I have very strong admiration and from which I draw inspiration for my work. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Christina. Finally, would you like to tell us, readers, something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? There are many things I am processing at this time, such as working with online short mediums. I would like to work around the short attention span of today’s day and age by displaying things that I believe bear some significance. My aim is to release a multitude of short works combining observations and abstract conditions meticulously conceived recently. I also plan to start work on my next major project this winter which might have collaborative aspects. Thank you for displaying my work on your publication and for this interview! I would also like to take a moment here to also thank the Literary House of Piraeus which is the keeper of Mr. Theocharis legacy and of which he was founder and president many-many years ago, for granting me the rights to use his extraordinary work “Death of The Blackbird” and for allowing me to translate it into the English language. An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

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Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers meets

Amie Nowlan Lives and works in Bristol, United Kingdom

Amie Nowlan is a film maker and visual artist going under the name Cut Film. Originally from Guildford, Surrey she now lives and works in Bristol from her studio in Stokes Croft. She studied Fine Art at Newcastle Upon Tyne and then went on to do her Masters in Animation at Bristol UWE. Using film as her medium she collages together different elements of the old and new, using archive footage as well as her own, and mixing those with visual effects and editing. She specialises in music videoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, motion graphics and live visuals and has worked with some wonderful musicians including Ishmael Ensemble, Typesun, Ment, Jumping Backslash and Nonku Phiri to name a few. Taking inspiration from a varied span of artists, from the early cinema creators The Lumiere Brothers to effects guru Cyriak she hopes to create some visual pleasures which play upon themes of the surreal and strange.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Hello Amie and welcome to : we would like to invite our readers to visit

in order to get a wider idea about your artistic production and we would start this interview with a couple of questions regarding your background. Are there any experiences that did particularly inform your current practice? Moreover, does your due to your studies of

Women Cinemakers Animation at the Bristol UWE direct the trajectory of your artistic research? Yes very much so. I feel very lucky to have been able to study art in the way I have. Studying Fine Art at Newcastle, where I studied my degree before Bristol, we were given great freedom to create in the way we wished. At this time I became quite engrossed with old B movies from the early 20th Century and films by Ray Harryhausen. I would create stills from imaginary films using pinhole cameras that I set up in an attic space and make scenes using toy monsters and cut out characters. This led me to want to make these scenes move, so animation was the natural progression. I have always liked the merging of reality with the surreal as I think it brings about a magical element to the world around us, which is why I like bringing film and animation together. I went on to make my own B movie homage which I pieced together using archive footage, green screened live action collage and stop motion animation. This definitely sent me down some very definite paths with my practice. For this special edition of we have selected , an extremely interesting music video that you produced for the

artist Ment and that can be viewed at . We have particularly appreciated the way you combine animation and dance to walk the viewers to the interstitial point between the ordinary and the surreal: when walking our readers through the genesis of , would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea? Both music and dance are very important to me. I have been part of a dance community for a couple of years now and I wanted to make something using it. When Ment, brought his track to me I knew it would work perfectly. Aysha is a wonderful dancer, with a natural rhythm and style. We didn’t choreograph any of the dance I simply gave her some initial direction, and there was a natural progression of ideas from that. I wanted to subtly play on the theme of the title ‘Vague Insanity’ and mix a very solid reality with trippy elements that would make the viewer question Aysha’s reality and subsequent utterings of madness. Brilliantly shot, features essential cinematography and keen eye for details: what were your

when shooting? In particular, what was your choice about camera and lens? I used a green screen for the shoot. I love collage and am always trying to merge collage with video. I felt that if I used green screen it would localise my subject and it would give me a greater freedom later when editing and adding effects. I wanted my subject to be to be so totally the focus, so that there were no other distractions giving the viewer complete freedom to take in the elements of her dance and animated peculiarities. So I put Aysha central to the frame and with a pure black background. Due to her clothing also being black I enjoyed how her head and limbs sometimes feel as though they are unattached and become separate entities. We have appreciated the way your approach conveys sense of freedom and reflects rigorous approach to the grammar of body language: how do you consider the relationship between the necessity of scheduling the details of your performative gestures and the need of spontaneity? How much importance does play improvisation in your process? The process was almost entirely improvised. We started by using a simple count of 8 for each

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Women Cinemakers

fixed pose with a transgressive movement between each. We played the music throughout and Aysha ad-libbed her dance. I would comment on parts that I thought worked and she would develop from that. One part I really liked was when we played on the idea that her limbs were taking over, for which she had no control. A feat Aysha managed whilst still managing to pull beautiful shapes. I had a fair amount of footage to use in order to edit it to how I wanted. I did want to edit quite tightly to the music however i thought it important to keep some of it looser; when the viewer may have felt it easy to second guess the next movement, throw in a more fluid cut. I would say that this is how i work generally with all my videos. I never have a definitive end product when I start, maybe just an idea, and I let ideas come and go as I work. You sapiently structured the combination between performative gestures and sound: how do you see the relationship between sound and movement?

Women Cinemakers My animation tutor used to relay to us constantly in capital letters â&#x20AC;&#x2DC; TIME GIVES MEANING TO MOTIONâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. This was a fundamental lesson of his and I think it is true not only in a literal way but also in a more emotive sense. It is a human instinct for us to dance and move to a beat and rhythm. This is something very primal in us and maybe when we dance we are at our most primitive. There is a reason so many people like to go out, dance, listen to music and let off a bit of steam. Dancing and music go hand in hand, and it would be quite weird to have one without the other. I think it is the same for sound and movement, when they work together it brings out qualities in each other you might not have necessarily noticed in one on its own. I find it much easier to work with something that has music as it always gives me a starting point. mixes realism with fast moments of surrealism, that walk the viewers through the interstitial point beteen reality and imagination and we have really appreciated the way it stimulates the viewers' perceptual parameters and allows an open reading: how much important is for you to trigger the spectatorship's imagination in

Women Cinemakers order to elaborate personal meanings? What do you hope your spectatorship will take away from your work? Yes this is important to me. I think using your imagination is one of the greatest gifts we have and much of storytelling is about triggering that. I would like the films that I make to be whimsical and conjure up all sorts of thoughts and feelings. People will take away from art whatever they please, it doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t necessarily need to be what the artist had in mind. This makes the pieces more personal I think, when they may be different to each person individually. Your experimental practice deviates from traditional videomaking to question the unbalanced relationship between everyday life's experience and the digital realm, reminding us of Sondra Perry's approach. Especially in relation to your editing decision, how do modern digital technologies affect your creative process? I would say this makes sense, as I am torn between my love of traditional film making, for its raw beauty and my intrigue in new technology and all its possibilities. I find it interesting how much of early cinema was created by magicians,

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it was a way to create optical illusions and trick the unsuspecting audience. Nowadays the audience is much more sophisticated and used to the most incredibly lifelike creations and I embrace digital technology as our evolving technique for creating these cinematic illusions. Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something 'uncommon', however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. How would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? At the moment Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m feeling quite positive about how women in the arts are going forward. Something I have noticed is how women are joining forces to create communities which provide support systems. I find this incredibly helpful knowing other female artists who I can call upon for help or knowledge. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not saying

Women Cinemakers I don’t speak to men about it also but having a female network does help inspire and boost confidence. Here in Bristol there are some really exciting projects going on such as as Saffron Records and their women in music mix nights and music tech courses. Also Sister Works, an empowering community for women in music and creative industries, is doing incredible things, providing courses, talks and work shops for women. I find it incredibly inspiring hearing from others about their personal journey. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Amie. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Recently I’ve been creating live visuals. It’s a way that I can be involved within events, manipulating film live along with music is a fast paced and exciting way to play with the medium. Presently I’m involved with creating the live visuals for the band Ishmael Ensemble. My next step will be projection mapping with which I want to work upon bringing surreal film into real life situations. An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Women Cinemakers meets

Jes Reyes Lives and works in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA My work grows from my artistic motivations to blend my interest in the cinematic arts with feminist theory and creative writing. I approach my projects with the goal to combine disciplines so that I can experiment with form. When I am photographing, I am creating a narrative through series-based works. When I am creating moving image, I merge the visual form of cinema with literary forms like poetry and memoir. Essentially, my work is connected to my intuitive approach. The camera for me is an extension of my mind and body, where I produce diarist, lyrical, and somatic art. I primarily explore the fragmentation of the past and how memories and experiences take shape within our present realities, but I am also curious about the structures of bodies, whether human or comprised from nature. I look to explore what is underneath the skin or surface and aim to express the experience of bodily manifestations of emotions and the strength of vulnerability. House of Vintage (2013), a photographic series, explores tchotchkes, the mĂŠlange of vintage stores, as well as my fascination and longing for the past. In Here, Mom (2014), a short video essay, I express my relationship with my mother by allowing the camera and the editing process to become an extension of my experience. Components (2015), a silent video poem, made in collaboration with poet Katie Rensch, layers moving images with words, and explores how our bodies intersect the manmade and natural world. To speak to these two worlds, a poetic voice emerges and translates what the body feels and what the body says to its segmented existence. The Wind of Our Body (2015), also made in collaboration with Katie Rensch, explores how the individual body, at times fragmented and enigmatic, attempts to communicate within the larger space of our society. As the body moves, a nonverbal language emerges that gives wind to our true emotional selves, a language that crosses barriers and accepts, our often, untranslatable world. In Loss (2015), a short video poem, I follow the emotions and experiences behind the word and the experience of loss in grief. Beneath the Skin (2016) explores the ongoing tenderness I feel towards the death of my mother. A silent video poem, it gets to the heart of my grief by delving into how my deepest memories lay beneath my skin. Drawing in the Moment (2017) is a short experimental documentary made in collaboration with Minneapolis-based artist Anita White. The film explores her intuitive artistic process and follows her journey of looking within, using her drawing and music to appreciate various moments in life. From meeting strangers to processing difficult health challenges, the art and music from Anita express compassion and humor. I attempt to work out my particular inquiries trough self-reflexivity and challenging traditional narrative forms. My art, image-based and non-linear, offers a handmade quality that is nonobjective in nature. I imagine this process as weaving images with subjectivity, tone, and mood. Though I tend to work alone, some of my works are created through intimate collaborations.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Moving and refined in its balanced and essential composition, is a stimulating silent video poem by interdisciplinary artist, curator,

and arts administrator Jes Reyes. Reflecting the artist's tenderness towards the loss of her mother to a terminal illness, this captivating video gently walks the viewers through a limbo where perceptual reality and memory show their elusive bond. Triggering the viewers' perceptual categories, Reyes demonstrates the ability to capture elusive potential of moving images, inviting the viewers to unveil what goes beyond our ordinary

perceptual experience: we are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her stimulating and multifaceted artistic production.

Hello Jes and welcome to : we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and you graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Film & Electronic Arts & Womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Studies from the California State University, Long Beach. You later nurtured your education with a Master of Liberal Studies that you received from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities: how did these experiences influenced your your and address your decisions in your artistic research? I went to a film school that was interested in teaching you how to work in Hollywood and make traditional narrative films. I thought thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what I wanted for a long time. So, it felt like the right place for me when I was there. I would find myself perplexed though over Hollywood and its treatment and representation of women. I wondered often if it was an industry for me. Over time, I was intimidated with the cost of making films too. These parts to filmmaking never stopped me from moving forward with a film career though. It motivated me to think about what I wanted to do as a filmmaker. Instead of going into film production, I decided to spend my time researching screenwriting and film theory, all informed by also studying feminist practices, feminist theory, and developing general advocacy work. This truly formed the foundation of my direction as an artist and my roots and desire to expand opportunities for other artists and not just for myself. As for many, exploring the French New Wave opened my eyes too. I do remember when I watched for the first time. I was sitting in an auditorium of two hundred students. When the film finished and after the instructor presented on the film, students bustled out to their next classes or to wherever they were going. I on the other hand remained in my seat, wondering to myself, So, I started to watch a lot of French New Wave. Soon after that, I came across Agnes Varda in a documentary class and I quickly became

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Women Cinemakers hooked on her work. Her work felt tangible to me. She inspired me. It connected me to film production styles that felt approachable and real. I like films that express our personal truths and explorations. My artistic research is fueled by this. I do from time to time enjoy the entertaining aspects of film and will enjoy a Hollywood blockbuster, but I always have a critical eye. I do think this is because I am a feminist and have a punk background. Experimenting and challenging the norm is natural within these identities. So, while a graduate student, I explored how personal storytelling and experimental film can reshape how we express our experiences and connect with others. I came to appreciate the literary nature of filmmaking and its ability to capture the voice of someone; that film could be a subjective and empowering, self-reflective medium for the artist. I learned that the stories I wanted to tell were poetic, essayist, and directly related to the first-person experience. You are an eclectic artist and your practice ranges from from video and photography to mixed media art, revealing the ability of crossing from a medium to another: before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to our readers to visit in order to get a synoptic idea about your artistic production: would you tell us what does address you to such captivating multidisciplinary approach? How do you select a medium and an art discipline in order to explore a particular theme? I do have the need to express myself variously. I find it is best to be flexible with my art. I feel I am a more honest artist if I am. I am pretty intuitive, so if I am feeling a particular way, I let that decide which discipline or medium to work with. Lately, all I want to practice is painting. Making films requires so much time staring at a computer and I have enjoyed time away from the screen. I have enjoyed working with my hands, the materials, and getting messy! Essentially though, I am interested in documenting, exploring life in real time, and understanding the manifestations of emotions and how we experience the past and our memories while in the present. My art practice involves looking, feeling, remembering, and being in the moment. The result is diarist, lyrical, and somatic art that reflects upon challenges, changes, and moments experienced. This process ultimately weaves images with

subjectivity, tone, mood, and often breaks from physical reality. This is mostly because I am looking to understand chaos, all to face the anxieties I experience and accept the unpredictability and stress found in life. So, I like to experiment with mediums because I feel like I can approach these themes through different ways of communication. With film and video, I can do that through metaphor, editing, and its moving image and time-based qualities. It is the perfect medium if you have a lot to layered things to express! I also tend to always find my way back to film because what I primarily want to say involves many images and a disordered narrative or subjectivity.

For this special edition of we have selected , a stimulating that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at . What has at once captured our attention of your your sapient narrative style is the way it provides the viewers with such an intense visual experience, enhanced by elegant composition. While walking our readers through the genesis of , would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea? In particular, do you like spontaneity or do you prefer

to meticulously schedule process?

of your editing

I can remember standing in a grocery store two months after my mother, Patricia, died. I grabbed a can of vegetables and the memory of my mother swarmed my mind, eventually causing a level of dissociation from my physical environment. There I was, me as a child, with my mom making food with her in the kitchen. I was standing in the aisle at the grocery store, but it felt like I was with her. I could even smell the garlic in her hand. Her long, thin blonde hair hung down around her shoulders, and swayed as she

mixed a bowl. But it was when a person from behind me said, “Excuse me,” that I was brought back, with the red grocery cart in front of me and the spirit of my mom still on my mind. This experience combines memory and emotion in ways that is profoundly inspiring for me. It has taught me that grief is complicated. We can hold onto the past or we can learn from it. Everything that I remember of my mother – the love I have for her and the emotions tied to her death flows through . It is the reason I made the film, because grief isn’t something that goes away and its unique to each person and to their own experience and how they process significant life events.

also came out of series of video poems I made about my relationship with my mother. and were the first two of these films. They began the process of looking back, remembering our life together, and expressing the very last moment I had with her while she was alive. In 2013, my mom learned she was living with a terminal stage of kidney failure. She was not a candidate for dialysis because of a weak heart. Both of these issues were the result of life-long complications to diabetes. My mom always faced many challenges with her health because of how the diabetes she lived with impacted her body. There were many times I thought I was losing her to the illness. Those experiences were much more crisis oriented where she experienced heart attacks, strokes, pneumonia, and high blood sugars. In the case of living terminally with an illness, things moved a little bit slower where we worked with her doctors to start hospice and develop an end-of-life plan. We were challenged with grief way before she even passed. I had a lot of time to think, spend time with her, and get to know her in new ways. She was ; making footage for the film and engaged with the making of participating in research interviews that informed the larger poem I made for was my creative thesis project, actually. It helped me finish the film. graduate school! I am a filmmaker that relies on real time, chance, and my intuition. I love planned spontaneity! I always start out with an idea, a theme I am looking to explore, or a visual I want to express. I never know exactly what the final piece of art may look like though, because free association is really what drives my process. I have a piece of writing that motivates the work; whether its a word, sentence, poem, or essay; it essentially moves me to create. Editing is the extended writing process and I am often also still filming while editing. Historically, there is no pre-production, production or post-production in my work. It generally happens all at the same time. So, I go out and find it with my camera. Usually, I will know what kind of image I need because I am working with a poem. When it comes down to it, I am looking for metaphors. I have tried to work in a more linear fashion but I can grow confused and bored in this setting because I begin to feel stifled and limited. So you could say I need spontaneity to create my work.

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Women Cinemakers We have particularly appreciated the way the combination between such minimal shooting style and your attention to details and evocative images provides with such a : what were your to achieve such powerful outcome? I was looking to visually express the layered and tender nature of grief found in the body. Grief flows in waves for me, memories can appear disordered, and can take over where I am least expecting it, ultimately impacting my body within that given time. When our loved ones leave us, their spirit never does. They are wrapped up in everyday associations. Also, grief lives in the darkness of our veins. So the film relies on levels of abstraction, pixelation, extreme high and low contrast, all to render the manifestation of emotion found in the body. Manipulated, the images go from overexposed to underexposed; intentionally to explore the intense differences the body can feel from varying states of emotions. These conceptual images interrupt the more representational images, as memories and emotions change as we recall and feel them, particularly to the point where they don't always look or appear to us as they really were. My approach to making this work and assembling my images is also directly inspired by HĂŠlĂ¨ne Cixous' l'ecriture feminine, a creative process which proposes a female form of writing that asks women to write from their bodies. This feminist practice aims to transform how we tell and relate to stories. I wrote this film directly from my body, because I wanted to the film to look and feel different. I also wanted its creation to act as an antithesis to defined ways of filmmaking. I do feel this technique and process created a new is much more visually stylized and aesthetic to my work. digitally manipulated when compared to my past and current films. As you have remarked in your artist's statement, gets to the heart of your grief : we daresay that it brings the concept of memory to a new level of significance, to unveil its elusive still ubiquitous bond with of our everyday life's experience. How do you c the role of memory within your art practice and your creative process? In particular, how much does daily experience fuel yourself as an artist?

I wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have my art without my memory. I am a diarist. I have always documented my life, ever since I was a little girl. Through poetry, drawing, photography, video, and calendars, my life was something I was always trying to understand and remember. I often think this is because I grew up with significant traumas and an unpredictable lifestyle. Practicing art through a diarist approach has given me some kind of control over the chaos I have come to know from life. I will also say that for someone living with anxiety, exploring memories in my art helps me feel present in the everyday. I can release the past through my art while also holding onto it. Memories can be so fleeting. They can disappear so quickly. But with a visual or some kind of writing, memories can resurface. I appreciate documentation in this way. With art, memories can exist in an additional form such as through a painting, film, or poem. I make art in the everyday or related to my daily experience so that I can explore and hold onto the past and so that I can live in the present moment. Marked out with such an essential and at the same time seductive beauty on a visual aspect your video addresses the viewers to a wide number of narratives: in our opinion could be considered an effective allegory of : would you tell us how much important is for you that the spectatorship the concepts you convey in your pieces, elaborating personal meanings? How open would you like your works to be understood? I feel with my pieces that I am aiming to create an emotional connection with my audience by exploring complex transitions found in life. In the case of , it is of loss and death, an experience that we all face at some point. It is a shared lament and life-changing event. It is important to me that people can relate to my films. This empowers my films to be open to interpretation. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want someone to walk away from one of my films where they only watched something. I want the viewing time to have also evoked personal meaning in that spectator. In , I intentionally removed my voice and gave the film a silent soundtrack so that I could invite the viewers to reflect and consider the images, possibly as their own. I wanted to create a silent space or window for the audience, which aims to motivate the viewer into contemplation; of their own memories and where their

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Women Cinemakers emotions exist, when in context with the past and within the current and present moment. Both realistic and marked out with dreamlike quality, reveals exquisite eye for the details and breathtaking editing style, to walk the viewers into a multilayered visual journey. We daresay that this video attempts to unveil the invisible that pervades our reality but that cannot be detected by our sensorial experience. Do you agree with this interpretation? Moreover, how do you consider within your process? Yes, definitely! I agree with this interpretation. I was looking for a way to visualize how emotions manifest within the mind and body. I spent many nights wondering, what does grief look like? Is it a dark cloud moving through my veins? Is it an activated sensation in my brain? And what does that literally look like? What do the waves of grief look like in my body? I used metaphor and patterns from nature to explore these questions. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really know what grief looks like so I used my imagination to reflect what it could look like. The process of using visuals of trees, water, and jellyfish asked me to look deeper and asked me to be aware of my surroundings. I was able to see the tenderness and layered reality of grief in these images. All of it shows a specific reality that I experience. seems to convey a We daresay that the ending part of message of hope and the blurring of the images seems to be a metaphors of the blending of the spirit with the whole world: what do you hope your spectatorship will take away from this video? I was aiming to convey how grief can take you away from the world that is revolving around you. It can make you feel disconnected. I wondered for a long time if I was always going to be experiencing grief with such high emotion all of the time. Is there hope for moving forward? Am I always going to feel like this? I also wanted to address my awareness of how emotions can filter our reality and that emotion can impact how we interpret experiences . I wanted to explore how and when we mentally and physically enter memories too. Blurring was a technique to convey this. It reduced detail and evoked a sense of transition

between the internal and the external. This process does invite the viewer to see the blending of these worlds. On the same line, the film opens and ends with the same shot. It is just reversed at the end. This was done for multiple reasons. It is a form of entrance and exit. I wanted to create a sense of dissociation for the viewer. What is it like to enter into a very real space for the body that exists internally. Dissociation for me was about losing time to emotion and memories. I would get stuck and disrupted, transported to the past. I would come out seconds and minutes later. I experienced a sense of disconnection to where I was in the moment. I used the grocery store example but this also happened to me while in a staff meeting at work or while teaching an art class. It just came over me. I wondered how long this would go on for. Over the years, dissociation has gotten better. Nighttime is still difficult, because that is when my body is still and my mind is moving. I am a big thinker before bed. I get transported to many ideas while falling asleep. I close my eyes and enter my imagination, my memories, my anxieties. I want the viewer to know all of this is real and is something we face as humans. Our emotions are real and that they should be acknowledged, processed, and accepted. Blurring of images, particularly of my eyes and the ocean considers this immersive quality and the grief comes at different intervals. Using moving image for this project was so important because it could explore this and my time based experience with grief. Shots of looking out into the ocean waves helped me express that there is hope for renewal. It's no doubt that collaborations as the ones that you have established with your short video poems with Katie Rensch and with Anita White for your are today ever growing forces in recent Contemporary Art and that the most exciting things happen when creative minds from different disciplines meet and collaborate on a project: could you tell us something about the collaborative nature of your work? Can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between artists from different disciplines? I approach my projects with the goal to expand documentary film and video, so when I collaborate I am looking to work with artists who can complement the moving image format and combine disciplines. I like to invite others who arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t

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Women Cinemakers necessarily experienced with film to create with me too. This often offers an inventive and fresh perspective to the work. Also, I only like to work with one other artist. I don’t like to work with crews. It is just me and the other artist. We generally do everything together, from filming to editing. This makes for an intimate collaboration where we are making the film as we go. I feel we can complete the best, most personal and authentic work this way. This makes me sounds very controlling actually, but I am not. These are just preferences. The process is very instinctive and while working we don’t really know what the end film will look like. We have an idea but the work unfolds as we go. It is an inspiring and engaging experience! For example, I partnered with artist Anita White to create because I was interested in exploring her intuitive approach to making art. Her documentary drawing style is intriguing to me so I asked her to make a film with me. I connected with her “in the moment” artistic approach, as I also work from a similar process. As we moved along with making this video, I was immediately inspired by its natural flow and its genre blend of experimental and real life. I appreciated Anita's honesty and vulnerability, found in her lyrics, singing, and art. Honestly, i was worried that we we were going to do a more traditional documentary and as we got going with the project, she helped introduce a direction and voice to the work that I would have never thought of on my own. I do feel it is the reason this short film is truly unique. This is why I collaborate: to experiment and be open to possibilities. I also want to connect creatively with another person because I know it is going to help me grow as an artist and open new pathways for trying something new. Over the years your artworks have been showcased in several occasions including your exhibitions with Artists in Storefronts, Altered Esthetics, Made Here, Feminist Video Quarterly, and the Walker Art Center. We have particularly appreciated your ability to create works of art capable of establishing direct relations with the spectatorship, so we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of medium is used in a particular context?

I don’t necessarily think about the audience in the initial stages of creating the work. The questions I usually ask myself revolve around how the medium is going to best serve the topic, story, theme, or intention of the work. As the work is coming together though, I do think of how the work will be received and what will build connection with the viewer. So I think of editing, framing, and composition and how the viewer will absorb the emotive and narrative qualities of the work. Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you in the contemporary art scene. to express your view on For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something ' ', however in the last decades women are finding their voices in art: as an artist interests in the cinematic arts with feminist theory, how would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? Wow - what a question. Thank you for asking it! It took me years to find my creative voice and this particular approach, mostly because I often felt like there wasn’t a place for me within the field of filmmaking. I did feel at times that I was discouraged to make something that was uncommon. Luckily, I am pretty stubborn and never stopped looking at film differently, from how I analyze it to how I want to produce work. Once I started to look at myself more fully as an artist though, I saw and fully embraced my interdisciplinary approach. I couldn’t exist as a filmmaker without it. It really opened my eyes to the possibilities of making film and video work. I am thankful for finding the video poem because it possesses a consciousness and production method that engages with my feminist artistic approach and supports my interest in transforming how we tell our stories on screen. I practice theoretical and foundational links between creative writing, film production, and feminist theory in my work. These theoretical connections contribute to the conceptualization of my projects, particularly around narrative and subject. How do women’s stories and thoughts get conveyed on film? This is a question of mine. It is a question that forms the basis for how I interact with the medium of film, both as a filmmaker and a spectator. I view dominant cinema’s construction of women on screen symbolic of fetishized desire. I see that she has been written

interview

Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers into the framework and rarely written for. Thus it is important for me to start any project with a feminist perspective and write from a centralized, personal, and nonobjective space. I feel by doing so I can offer something honest within the realm of filmmaking. We have to challenge film conventions, such as underlying issues found in representation and spectatorship. We can make change by telling our stories and we can respond to and critique the films we watch by not being passive viewers. Traditional narrative cinema (i.e. classic Hollywood films) creates for us a false reality. It is these representations that have created and perpetuated patriarchal ideals of masculinity and femininity, ultimately supporting problematic mainstream ideas on gender. And it continues to this day. Significant feminist thoughts on these issues have developed alternative film practices that have aimed to deconstruct and offer solutions to artists who desire ways to engage with the medium of film that is different. I identify as one of those artists and I ask other artists to do the same so that we can make progress, make change, and tell our truths. The future of women in this field requires that we make our voices heard. We must make our films and never stop. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Jes. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Last September, I read my poetry in public for the first time. I was presenting work I had completed at the Hinge Arts Residency, a Springboard for the Arts program located on the grounds of the former Fergus Falls State Hospital in Minnesota. After I finished my reading, I received live feedback that I had never experienced before. I found a real-life connection with my audience and it came from me reading my poetry out loud to people. It felt intimate, authentic, and necessary. In all my years of creating poetry, I had never shared my writing this way. As a video poet, even in its interdisciplinary form, I've generally only screened or installed my work. Prior to this, I had never thought of sharing my poetry publicly without it being part of a video project. I left Fergus Falls that weekend knowing I needed to find ways to share my poetry more, independently from my film/video work. So, my next step is to focus on the literary foundation of my practice through the publication of my first chapbook. Over the years, I have created a body of writing from my video poems that I want to strengthen and inspire new work from. Focusing on my writing will expand my work

Women Cinemakers meets

Megan Hattie Stahl Why do people turn into filmmakers once they become parents? What are they trying to capture when filming their children, treating them as adorably charismatic hosts of talk show with an audience of few? And what if their children don't follow the script?

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Hello Megan and welcome to WomenCinemakers: you are a versatile artist and we would invite our readers to visit in order to get a wider idea about your multifaceted artistic production and we would like to introduce you to our readers with a couple of questions about your background. Are there ny experiences that did particularly influence your artistic

evolution? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum due the years you spent in Europe direct the trajectory of your artistic research? Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been journaling regularly since age 10 or so, which has always been therapeutic for me but can also be considered obsessive documentation of my life. Especially significant during my college years in Portland, Oregon was my discovery of documentary as art and a developing appreciation for the beauty of daily life reinforced by my studies of French literature

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and film. Specific influences from that time were Agnès Varda’s “Daguerréotypes” and Philippe Delerm’s “La premiére gorgée de bière.” Documenting my own life thus evolved with the realization that this could be done powerfully and artfully. These feelings and influences all collided around the age of 20 (I’m now 27). Living in Paris for 3 years exposed me even more to different ways of life as I documented both my own assimilation, particularly linguistic, and also the ways in which I resisted adapting to French life. Most concretely, following my experience as an au pair from ages 19-20, I have since been fascinated by the concept, and by the diversity of young people drawn to the romantic yet challenging reality of Parisian au pair life. I plan to direct a documentary feature one day about Parisian au pairs, and have already interviewed numerous subjects about their experiences. For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected Be Cute, Now!, a stimulating experimental

Women Cinemakers short film that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed directly at https://vimeo.com/215370667. What has at once caught our attention of your insightful inquiry into the nature of video as a medium to freeze and recontestualize the experience of being parents is the way you provided the results of your artistic research with allegorical and multilayered qualities. When walking our readers through the genesis of Be Cute, Now! would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea? Last spring, I was in a found footage editing workshop with Portland filmmaker Jodi Darby, and our assignment was to produce a short from found footage. I happened to have tons of home videos digitized from my parents’ old VHS camera, because again, I’m very nostalgic and obsessed with documentation, so I thought it’d be interesting to repurpose this footage and blend it with found footage. What struck me when reviewing some of the home videos was the direction my parents often gave me, particularly up to age three when

Women Cinemakers my younger brother joined the family. So, I decided to build a sort of narrative around that while juxtaposing the home video footage with either absurd, vapid or related found footage, ranging from a show parrot in a bird show to a silly old toy commercial, and just went from there. We have particularly appreciated your sapient use of archival footage and the way your editing style triggers the viewer's perceptual parameters in order to question the relationship between memory and experience. How was your editing process and how did you structure the flow of images in order to reach such powerful narrative? Once I stumbled across the found footage of a show parrot being admonished for “bashfulness”, I knew it would be a clip I wanted to use early on and pair with the home video clip of my mother encouraging me to imitate animals. Later I wove in images and talk of babies, snacks, and tried overwhelm the viewer with excessive repetitive questioning. This leads

up to a more formal “performance” from my father and I on the trampoline and a subsequent rhythmic explosion of music, movement and a proliferation of images, ending with a rebellious, fitting conclusion. In your film you have mixed home recordings and archival footage: what were you aesthetic decision when combining footage from different sources? I like to keep elements of surprise, play, and humor in my work, so that lead to a mix of black and white stuff both new and old, contemporary YouTube clips, stock footage, etc. Also, I don’t clearly remember any of the events captured in the home videos, so it was both strange and fascinating to be working with such personal footage from a mostly aesthetic perspective, analyzing the dialogue and look rather than connecting to the vague memory and reality that THIS WAS ACTUALLY ME! As you have remarked in your artist's statement, your artistic research is guided

Women Cinemakers by your cultural curiosity and you fascination with real people and their perspectives: how does everyday life's experience fuel your creative process? In particular, does your artistic research respond to a particular cultural moment? Self-made, creative women speaking out frankly and openly, expressing themselves through art- whether through podcasting, film, music, or comedy- inspires me endlessly. Lots of my work is personal so I take note of my feelings and the people and things around me. I also relate to aspects of the French New Wave in terms of acknowledging the presence of a camera in film, the bare bones spirit of Dogme 95, and the pure truth of Cinéma Vérité. Be Cute, Now! is rich of symbols, that challenge the viewers' cultural parameters and in other works, as in now sing / nothing, you seems to wlk the viewers to the thin line that divides reality to dreamlike dimension: how much important is for you to address them to elaborate personal associations?

Be Cute, Now! and Now Sing / Nothing both utilize home video footage and images of things that most people are familiar with: kids running across a backyard, a crowd of people clapping, clouds in the sky, a child eating or wearing a Halloween costume. With these projects I’m most interested in viewing these seemingly normal actions and phenomena and treating them as aesthetic themes to be remixed, distorted into mirrored or repetitive fantasy, and blended together to be more engaging that they’d be unedited. You are a classically trained pianist and your works often features minimalistic soundtracks that provide the footages with such an ethereal atmosphere: how did you select the music for your soundtrack and how do you structure the combination between video and sound? One element of my found footage editing class was learning about acceptable use of public domain and royalty-free music. In this way, music selection was limited by

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what I could legally use, so I found instrumental music on freemusicarchive.org. The Scott Joplin rag played well into the idea

of spectacle I wanted to create, while contrasting interestingly with the ambient, foreboding M-PeX track layered underneath.

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At the end, the Finnish minimal electronic song was more mindless with a driving beat, so it mixed well with the echoing voices I

stretched out to be more haunting and daunting. In terms of video and sound, I love editing to music and sounds often help

enormously to add structure and rhythm to a piece. Music also helped contribute essentially to the desired sense of surprise and unpredictability. The concept of improvisation is one of the idea bahind your film and its title seems to refer to the attempt of the 'directors' (parents) to prettify the 'actors' (children) and highlight the blurry boundary between reality and fiction: in this sense, we daresay that Be Cute, Now! reflects what Guy Debord described in his essay La Société du Spectacle. Did you aim to create an allegory of our contemporary media driven society or did you mean to inquiry in the individuals' attempt to shape the representation of reality according to their expectations? More the latter. I wanted, in part, to poke fun at a parent “director”s attempt to control a child’s behavior to make for a better “tape” rather than allow the child to act as their natural selves. On a larger level, yes, I also considered contemporary society’s tendency

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Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers to live through their devices rather than with their eyes, having attended many concerts in a sea of iPhones. I, of course, am not exempt from documenting and sharing what I see rather than experiencing it! But if I’m obsessed with documentation, as a documentary artist, it’s because I want to capture things in order to put them out into the world, whereas home videos are selfishly shot for one to watch later, or increasingly, to show to one’s friends and family on social media. To put bluntly, who cares what happens on home videos when they’re simply time capsules for the real lives of young children to be enjoyed by the family later? Why spoil the cuteness of children’s natural behavior with commands? Your experimental practice deviates from traditional videomaking to question the unbalanced relationship between everyday life's experience and the digital realm, reminding us of Sondra Perry's approach to the interstitial point between cultural issues and the digital technosphere. Especially in relation to your editing

decision, how do modern digital technologies affect your creative process? I’ve seen some of Sondra Perry’s work and am flattered by the comparison to see the least. Most of today’s modern digital technologies seem to be born from an unnecessary desire to monitor, track, and listen to humans and they scare the shit out of me. In general with my work, I try to engage minimally with technology and am much more interested in concepts and than mastering the technical aspects of filmmaking or special effects. I edit with Final Cut Pro X and don’t plan on changing anytime soon. Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something 'uncommon', however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. How would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist?

Women Cinemakers And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? Most of my inspiration has come from fellow women artists, and my most creative and interesting peers and film professors have all been women. With increased visibility for the brilliance of woman artists will come more and more girls looking up to them will follow their example, so I think the future is bright. In terms of my own development, while it’s unfortunate for society as a whole, I’ve benefited from the disproportionate amount of encouragement girls receive to be in touch with their emotions. This coupled with being naturally introverted has always lead me to spending lots of time self-isolating, looking inward and developing creatively on my own. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Megan. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about

your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? When I started making film I found it safest and easiest, both logistically and emotionally, to focus on sharing images from my own family and personal life and expressing my own perspective. Within the last year or so, though, I think I’ve further developed my artistic voice and have made a conscious effort to focus on subjects besides my self or family, through radio documentary production in Portland, a recent music and memory-related documentary short during a residency in rural Italy, and my current workin-progress, a documentary short about a woman from my Oregon hometown who collects, in her words, “teeth and other oddities.” Throughout my life I hope to gradually expand the scope and length of my projects, exploring different themes and parts of the world as I go. An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Women Cinemakers meets

Jola Kudela Lives and works in Paris and London

I was born in Poland and I now travel between Paris, London and Warsaw for various projects. I graduated from the Lodz Film School PWSFTViT (Master of Fine Arts degree in Animation and Visual Effects) and completed my training at the department of animated film at CFT Gobelins in Paris. I currently work as director, animation director and visual supervisor. My work portfolio represents a variety of skills. My extensive professional experience, both in the area of special effects (VFX) and graphic design or directing of advertising spots as well as animated films, is augmented by my life-long creative passion for visual and graphic arts

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Captivating and refined in its minimalistic and effective structure, I choose not to is a stimulating art installation by Polish compositing, motion e graphic design artist Jola Kudela. Exciting the viewers' perceptual parameters, this stimulating work offers an emotionally charged visual and sound experience, to address the spectatorship to inquiry into the lack of political awareness that affects our unstable contemporary age.

Engaging her spectatororship to go beyond the limits of ordinary perception, Kudela's work is an effective social and political commentary that highlight what is going on in todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s society: we are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her stimulating and multifaceted artistic production.

Hello Jola and welcome to WomenCinemakers: we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and graduated from the Lodz Film School PWSFTViT with a Master of Fine

Women Cinemakers Arts degree in Animation and Visual Effects and you later nurtured your education at the department of animated film at CFT Gobelins in Paris: how did these experiences influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum direct your artistic research? Everything we experience in our lives leaves a trace in us and the sum of it constructs the image of a person we become. I was born in a communist Poland before the Iron Curtain came down. It was quite an experience . From today's perspective it seems like another century on a different planet. The country was very grey. I used to live on an industrial estate, where every morning at 5am hundreds of buses arrived to take people to work in nearby factories. As a child I became determined I would never end up on one of those buses. And that's where the idea of becoming an artist came from. I was lucky, because one of my aunts was a painter, and she quickly redirected my fascination with copying Disney drawings to more appropriate subjects. So from the age of 15 to 20 I went to an art school. It was hard work, I probably never worked so hard since then. But it helped to shape me and my understanding of aesthetic criteria. From the age of 20 to 25 I studied at the Lodz Film School. It was a fantastic place, a creative hub. We

Women Cinemakers couldn’t expect traditional education, everybody was free to do whatever they wanted, with full access to a big library and two school cinemas where you could ask to see whatever film you desired, and with only one obligation – we had to present our finished movie at the end of the academic year. It was a fantastic way of gaining experience by doing things rather than just talking about them. Of course, as in every small community, everybody’s output was very similar. We all watched Greenaway, Jarman, listened to Philip Glass and made dark, existential, boring ;) movies. But we were happy with our darkness. And this darkness I think is one of the very characteristic marks that we - eastern European filmmakers – carry within us. So both of my experiences in Poland -art school and film school - are reflected in my creative works. The art school imposed aesthetic values and the film school taught me narration. BTW when I was young and I was showing some of my works to my aunt - the painter - she would usually say "stop being so talkative - your are not writing a book here - it's a painting, don't tell me stories, show me the drama by your colours and composition" . When I was at the film school my teachers used to say "it sure is a beautiful picture but what do you want to say by it, what's your story?" how about that for the internal conflict of our protagonist...

When I came to France, I found their hedonistic and consumerist way of being very challenging. For the creative part - people just didn't understand what I was proposing. It was a different world. Sadness, nostalgia or just objectivism - scared them. It took me 10 years to stop trying to fit in, and to adopt a "subtle way of not giving the f..k" So yes, I would say something quite obvious - our childhood and education in our young age determine what we do for the rest of our life. The main problem

that I see in it, is how to deal with outside world and how to preserve and find your own voice even if it's against the accepted â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;normâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected I choose not to, a captivating art installation that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at http://yolart.net/I-choose-not-to. What has at once captured our attention of your insightful

inquiry into the lack of political awareness that affects our unstable societies is the way you have provided the results of your artistic research with such captivating aesthetics: while walking our readers through the genesis of I choose not to, would you tell how did you develope the initial idea? The main idea started in Poland when "Law and Justice" political party won in the elections in 2015, and with the majority in the Polish parliament they started destroying democracy, while pushing towards fanatic nationalistic catholicism. I was

shocked that people did nothing and let it happen. And then Brexit arrived in the UK and Trump in the USA. It was the same phenomenon - even if we don’t agree we follow blindly someone else’s choices. The idea gained an international context, so I began a series of photos of people who cover their eyes and refuse to see what’s going on - I pasted them up on the walls of different towns in Europe. The sentence " the blind leading the blind" seemed quite adequate as a title of the project. Following that idea I decided to complete the project by moving images that I wanted to project on walls.

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But this time I wanted to give the viewer a hint as to its meaning. At the same time i wanted to shift the meaning to a larger context. We, as the human race, feel justified to overpower other species and we are simply destroying the world without even noticing it. Our choice to be ignorant is distressing. Elegantly shot, I choose not to features stunning cinematography and from a visual point is marked out with such a seductive beauty: what were your aesthetic decisions to achieve such powerful outcome? And what were your choices of camera and lens? I wanted to have large-scale characters cut out from a background that I could project on city walls. The original facades of buildings would play the role of a background. And the main effect that i was interested in was the scale - a "blind" guy of the size of the 5 storey building would be quite a wake up call to the viewers. So, as usual in my paste ups, I was using green screen as the background, which enabled me to cut the characters out quickly. But in moving pictures, when you want to do the keying, you have to use quite a good equipment to avoid compression in the green. I used my Canon 5D camera, and even if I chose to shoot in RAW it wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t a perfect material for keying. So to make my life easier, I chose to shoot directly on black screen and to

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superimpose characters in postproduction. A bit like Norman Mclaren in "pas de deux"- it was one of my huge fascinations at film school and it still inspires me today apparently So I bought three "made in china" tangstens on ebay for £100 and a treadmill on ebay for £45… and i was ready for the shoot ... in my garden .... yes yes it was a purely home made production. What I really love nowadays - is this easy access to technology that allows us to do whatever we want. There are no more excuses – we can’t stay at home and complain that we are misunderstood artists who can't find the funds to finance our movies. You just keep it small and simple, and off you go! So you asked me about my gear, like I said, Canon 5d mark III, canon lenses EF24-70 and EF100 , normally i use mainly EF16-35 but obviously not for this project. I shot in RAW and ... one more essential detail that has helped a lot ... I have my own Flame Assist for postproduction. I bought it second hand after one of my commercial productions. I can use it now for work on my personal projects, so that simplifies the task a lot. Both realistic and marked out with dreamlike quality, I choose not to reveals exquisite eye for the details and breathtaking editing style, to walk the

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viewers into a visionary adventure. We daresay that this video attempts to unveil the invisible that pervades our reality but that cannot be detected by our sensorial experience. Do you agree with this interpretation? Moreover, how do you consider the relationship between reality and imagination within your process? Yes, the project is a little dreamlike, not much happens on the screen, only the symbolic synthesis of the idea. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a kind of a somnambulic dance, a motive that was very present in Polish art. The guys like Jacek Malczewski with the painting "Vicious Circle" (1897) , Stanislaw Wyspianski with a theatre play "Wesele" (1901) filmed by Wajda in 1973, or Wajda's film Ashes and Diamonds (1958). They used it to criticise the focus on the consumerism and the lack of the will to fight for the right causes in our society. Times have changed, as well as the causes, but the apathy still remains. I choose not to addresses the viewers to a wide number of narratives and we daresay that the desire for understanding that pervades it could be considered an effective allegory of human experience: would you tell us how much important is for you that the spectatorship rethink the concepts you convey in your artworks, elaborating personal meanings? How open would you like your works to be understood?

A still from

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Usually i don't want to be too exact, too literal. I prefer to leave it up to the viewer to complete the sentence. I'm always afraid to be too serious, too boring or kitsch while using too obvious connotations. Leaving space for interpretation can be dangerous, you can just miss your goal, and people can misunderstand what you want to say. But it's not a documentary, and i presume the viewer will have some kind of a global awareness. I don't have to show oceans of plastic, dead polar bears, pollution, deformed kids born in radioactive areas, racist confrontations ect. i choose to show the emotions, the feeling, and the mass of people saying "i don't want to see it" seemed stronger to me. There are keys to the interpretation - especially the character walking blindly on the industrial landscape , walking like a huge master of everything, and destroying everything as he walks. But if the viewer doesn't understand what itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s all about, then perhaps he or she is just like them, choosing not to think, choosing to be blind. In another piece of mine "doubting Thomas" the connotation is quite far as well. The title is a clue to understanding. But you have to know the story of doubting Thomas, you will have to be aware of the analogy to the Caravaggio painting, you will have to

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realise that the Maori guy playing Thomas doesn't touch the wound of the Filipino guy playing Jesus. You will have to realise that he is painting and that paint is blood etc. What is all that supposed to mean? For me Thomas, by touching Christ’s wound, believed in his holiness, in my case the Maori guy creates his religion by painting and art is his religion. So well it's not so obvious, perhaps it leaves too much space for interpretation. It’s easier and more simplistic to do stuff like "throwing a flower at a tank". The minimalistic and penetrating soundtrack by David O'Brien provides I choose not to with such an unsettling atmosphere, to enrich the footage with an emotionally powerful sound tapestry: how do you see the relationship between sound and movement playing within your approach to moving images? The music is a very important ingredient of the filmmaking. It gives you a tone, a rhythm, an ambience, the emotions. Music by itself is much closer to our feelings than a picture, it’s like a cry, like a voice, like a song. It's something internal and the picture is something external. So most of the time, before i start working I choose the music first. That dictates the mood for my idea. It's like Eisenstein, with his idea of editing. You cross-edit a crying

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baby and a woman's face, and shooting soldiers with the woman's face, and your interpretation of the woman's emotions will change. The same with music. The same pictures with different music will be perceived differently. So before i start editing i choose the music and the music dictates the rhythm of the edit. Another interesting work that we would like to introduce to our readers is entitled Doubting Thomas and it's inspired by a Caravaggio's painting and we have deeply appreciated the way you mix historical references to contemporary approach, to unveil the resonance between art from a past age and the issues of our unstable contemporary age: how do you consider this aspect of your practice? In particular, how do you see the relationship between past and present playing within your artistic research? I'm constantly referring to the past, especially to the art history, in my projects. First of all, it's a kind of inheritance weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve received, and can't ignore its existence. All our understanding of the world, contexts, analogies and symbols comes from it. We can't behave as if we are blank canvas, as if weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re coming from nowhere. Everything we are is a continuation, development and progression of our past and history. I love playing with that as well. I like taking some known images and changing them according to the modern

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context. Very often by changing a little detail you can change its perception completely. I once made an adaptation of da Vinci's ‘the Virgin and child with St.Anne’. I kept the same composition and the subject, but recreated it with contemporary characters. The girl who was playing St. Anne had a shaven head. It created a big scandal in Poland. I was accused of robbing the image of its holy context by putting contemporary characters into the picture. People still read the baby as Jesus, the first girl as Mary, but the second woman was read as a lesbian, Mary's partner. Of course that was considered blasphemous. But I was asking a question - why did we assume that in the XVI century original the second woman wasn't a lesbian, but in today’s context she is? I think our perception is totally blinded by socially established clichés. We have highly appreciated your insightful criticism on indifference and passivity to what is going on in today’s society: not to mention that these days almost everything, ranging from Marina Abramovic's 'Dragon Heads' to Hannah Wilke's Through the Large Glass, could be considered political, do you think that your practice could be considered political, in a certain sense? In particular, do you think that your being a woman provides your artistic research with some special value?

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Well, I always try to give meaning to my works. I wouldn't say it's political, but it’s socially engaged. We are living in difficult times and it's quite difficult to not to react to what’s going on or to make purely abstract, decorative creations. Does being a woman provide added value? That is a large question. I would say it provides more handicaps in a social context. The world has been constructed by men and for men. But is the lower level of testosterone and being a member of a "lower class" influencing the creativity or does it give us a special power? I wouldn't say so. I place my subjects on a more human than gender level. But for sure there are hormonal differences in the brain between men and women and the perception of the wold and your place in it will be totally different, depending on your gender. But it’s not something I’m aware of in my art, and I have never approached it as a subject. Technically women are supposed to be more perceptive than men, more fragile and attentive. It's supposed to be like that because our bodies and brains are prepared and adapted to breed children - something totally vulnerable and without any possibility of communication other than crying. We as women are supposed to able to read the child’s body language, feel its emotions and needs.

Women Cinemakers

We can use those skills in our professional life. From my own experience as an art director â&#x20AC;&#x201C; as a woman I can see a larger spectrum of colours than my male coworkers. The difference sometimes is quite surprising. But on a physical level being a woman is a big handicap when you have to work in unprotected environment. Being weaker and smaller than the other half of the population is a huge disadvantage and can be quite dangerous. I never go out on a shoot or for a street art project alone. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve experienced too many confrontations with males who wouldn't hesitate to use their strength to their advantage. I choose not to has been awarded in several occasions and has been recently selected at the So Limitless and Free Film Festival in Montreal, Quebec: how much importance has for you the feedback that you receive in the festival circuit? And how do you feel previewing a film before an audience? Actually it is very important. Most of my professional time is spent doing the commercial projects. As an art director, compositing artist ect. Only quite recently (in the last few years) I began to try to put more effort into my personal artistic research . It's very encouraging and motivating when you get positive feedback. Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in cinema. For more than half a

Women Cinemakers

century women have been discouraged from getting behind the camera, however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. What's your view on the future of women in cinema? The world is changing slowly, and the place of a woman in the society is evolving. We’ve gained freedom. (sadly only in this part of world, not everywhere). But here we can live now without a context of a man that we would belong to. It's a huge achievement. We are free with our choices and lives. So really, now it's only up to us, how we manage this freedom. I don't believe that these days if you have a good script a funding commission would refuse you the money because you are a woman. They can refuse it because they don’t know you or don’t consider you the right person, but it's a different story. But there is another aspect of being a woman. We tend to have kids. And if a mother has a choice of take care of her kid or to spend days and nights on the shoot ... The choice usually is made for us. So that would always be a difference between men and women in their career progression. There is another danger in taking time off and delaying the start of your carrier. When you arrive on the market quite late, in your 40s or so, you’re not acknowledged anymore as a young and

talented artist. Instead they tend to judge you through a filter of ageism. In addition, the world is ruled by tribes or a kind of private clubs. Quite often that there are mostly “boys' clubs". And If you are an outsider it is very difficult to get in, in most of cases. Women should perhaps work more together and be more supportive towards each other. Well, there’s a soluton to all this of course you have to be better than the youngesters. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Jola. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? My artistic projects are on a stand-by at the moment, as I’m working as art director on a feature film in France. It's a co-production between France, Germany and Belgium, and it takes a lot of time and effort to coordinate everything. But the development time is finishing soon, and the German side will take over. I will have more time for myself and I’m planning to produce my next short movie. I don't really want to say more about it yet, because I’m sure it’ll change hundreds of times before I’ll finish it An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com