instinctively. Near the beginning of the film there’s a wideshot of Clara Pluton and Caro Luttringer where they’re pushing Luccia Rennie along on this office chair. They lined up everything so perfectly in the very first take, so that she appears and reappears behind a little tree and it was just a real indication of how in sync they all were. They didn’t even know they’d done it but it just worked. As for all the scenes with dialogue, those were rehearsed but those rehearsals were really just to get people comfortable with each other. The conversations between practice takes are probably way more important. There was only one scene I didn’t do rehearsals for and to me that scene sticks out a little. turtleneck didn’t really change much from script to film, apart from the actual order of the scenes with some cut out here and there. However, I think I’d like to try something where the dialogue can have elements of improvisation too, along with less storyboarding. We can recognize such subtle socio political criticism in your words, when depicting our unstable contemporary age: . Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, " ". Not to mention that almost everything, ranging from Caravaggio's Inspiration of Saint Matthew to Joep van Lieshout's works, could be considered , what could be in your opinion the role of filmmakers in the contemporary age?
It’s so easy now to make something look and appear “cool”, to create these really refined images. The more money you have, the more you can control those images and of course that’s true of politics too. Ego and aesthetics will probably always dominate any art form that I think as long as your motivation isn’t just to add to that noise, you might be surprised at how many people are willing to listen. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Hannah. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Thank you for such thoughtful questions, at the moment a short film I made called Nosophoros is touring England until the spring of 2018 as part of a larger exhibition called Playback. The film was supported by the Institute of Contemporary Arts’ STOP PLAY RECORD scheme and was my first time working on something where the score was completely original, thanks to Loner Muaka (who also goes by Lones, he was the main sound recordist for turtleneck too) and Ahmad Taqiudin. It’ll be released at some point online soon (I update all that kind of stuff@hannahfordfilm). Other than that I would love to work towards making a feature film. At the moment I’m just writing and waiting for the pieces to present themselves as part of the same thread but I’m trying to take a bit of a breather too. I recently moved from London in the UK to Vancouver so it feels good to be looking at things through a slightly different lens.
Hello Aislinn and welcome to WomenCinemakers: to start this interview we would ask you a couple of questions regarding your background. Are there any experiences that particularly influence the way you currently conceive and produce your works? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum inform your career? Anybody who makes anything, who you are, your cultural background, how you got to where you are now completely informs everything that you do. I come from a working-class background, in a rural Irish village. That has, undoubtedly, had an influence on my work. I was also the first person on my father's side of the family to go to university, which itself has had an influence on how I approach things – there is a combination of very different experiences there. Also, as a woman, I definitely incorporate my experiences into my work. In particular, I went through a traumatic and complicated birth with my son, which was almost twenty years ago now. I was only seventeen at the time. That is something that certainly of comes up in everything I make, in some way or another, of which I must admit Childer is an meets An interview by Francis Quettier and Dora Tennant Aislínn Clarke example. But, even if I didn't have experiences like that, I would still have been drawn to dark stories and emotions, I always have been. I was always reading dark stories. At a very young age, it was Grimm fairytales, then later, my uncle always use to tell us folktales that he'd learned and picked up. This was my uncle Mickey who then went on to kill himself. He had never finished telling us The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs. I think I then just imagined a lot of different possible endings to The Monkey's Paw over the years. In fact, I only actually learned the real ending just before I took a version of it to the Edinburgh Fringe, because I avoided it that whole time. It was like he was never going to come back to tell me the end of the story. Once I found out what happened, then he was definitely dead. But in the intervening years, I came up with all kinds of endings for that story. Him telling us stories; my da showing us horror films on the sly, when my mother wasn't looking; me reading Grimm fairytales and Greek legends. I wasn't a popular child, I didn't have many friends, I only had my sister and we were invested in our world, a shared world. We shared a lot of these things, we still do: making up stories. I think as a woman – an Irish woman – where you're taught to watch and listen and smile and nod and facilitate other people's brilliance or other people's skills and talents and not to hog the limelight, I learned how to be watchful and how to be observant and I'm very empathetic. I think another thing that comes out of my work is just that sense of quiet
observation. I don't like an active camera necessarily. I like the camera to be an observer, like I am, and I don't like to have an awful lot of fast paced editing either. I like to know what I'm going to shoot, everything, the mis-en-scene is already in my head before I go anywhere near the set. Then the camera is just my eye as I saw it already in my head and it translates it into a reality. I used to make a lot of home movies as a kid, walking around with the camera. I suppose it was a little bit of power maybe, but also the things that you would do – I always had this feeling of being a ghost, of being insubstantial and invisible, like my mother used to say “little girls should be seen and not heard”, I think my father probably said it too, my grandfather definitely said it and I really felt like I wasn't seen or heard – I felt like a ghost. I didn't have any friends in school, nobody was playing with me, I was playing by myself and with my sister, and there was something about if you record something you can watch it back and it really happened, you had an impact, you did something that exists, it's tangible. For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected Childer, an extremely interesting film that our readers have already staterd to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. Escaping from traditional narrative form, your film features a brilliant storytelling: how did you develop the script and the structure of the film? The seeds of the scripts were something that I'd had in my head for a number of years. I used to live, just me and my son, in this big old house that had that wasn't connected to another house – detached – it had land around it, a big garden, and there were children who lived in the house next door and they had a massive garden too. We never saw their parents, but I imagine the parents had issues with alcohol or drugs or something. The children were always unwashed, barefoot, unattended, they roamed in a pack. They started to fixate on me because I was someone's mother and maybe I could be their mother too. They actually said that to me once or twice, that they wished that I was their mother, that I could be their mother because my house was more or less clean and I was there whereas I don't know what was going on with their parents. They came round to my house one time with a frog and said we found this frog at the bottom of your garden and if you kiss him he will be a prince and the other girl said our sister kissed a frog once but she's dead now. That's all they said. It felt almost like a threat and it felt like a Grimm fairytale, it felt like the things that happened in the books I grew up reading. And I just thought that's really good. I didn't kiss the frog. They said that to me
because they knew I didn't have a boyfriend. I thought they were nice kids – really wayward – I felt bad for them. I used to think sometimes that there aren't parents at all, I never saw the parents at home and maybe they're just organic creatures that have grown up out of the ground. The garden was overgrown and difficult to manage and I started to fantasise that maybe they were nature spirits: Childer. Childer is a colloquial Irish word for children. People in rural areas wouldn't say children, they'd say childer, particularly if they're talking about a group of children that are badly behaviour or threatening in some way. Urchins would be childer, scallywags are childer. Childer are not neat, well-behaved children, there is something sinister about childer. That was was the genesis of the idea and it was developed with Northern Ireland Screen, via the NI Screen/BFI Shorts to Features scheme, and with Margaret McGoldrick at Causeway Pictures. I had a feature script in development with Northern Ireland Screen and the scheme allowed me to develop some of the aesthetic qualities of what that would be via a short.
In Childer you have combined clever attention to details and accurate attention to close up shots: what were your main aesthetic decisions in terms of composition and shooting? I don't like to shoot things that just do one thing, that just drive the story, or just look good, or that just impart a sense of atmosphere. I like shots to earn their place and do several things at once, so, if I can, I will put in more than just the information that's driving the story forward, there will always be some symbol of the theme, something like that. I did some bifocal shots, I would have done more, but it was a really tight shoot, time-wise, and some things had to be sacrificed. There's a definite point to the bifocal shots: when Mary and Mark are in the frame together, I always wanted to feel like they were in each others space. There's a lot of land around this house, it's in an expansive forest, there's an open garden, but their relationship with each other is very claustrophobic, so the mother and son are
interviewalways present, even when one thinks their alone: when Mary is in the bath, you can hear Mark singing in the other room. They're just always in each other's space, even when Mark's dead he's still there. It's a techinque that Brian de Palma used in the 70s, in Carrie. I always like to take my aesthetic cues from things in the past, I don't like to make films like people make them today, I like to experiment with techniques that people used in the past and have stopped using. I don't want to make a film that looks like everybody else's, y'know, slick and modern. It doesn't suit my worldview or how I live, so that was just one thing that I picked up from films in the past that I thought looks good, works well, and works well for my purposes. Meticulously composed close up shots are a landmark of your shooting style. The thing I'm most interested in is, which I suppose most film-makers are, is driving at the emotional truth of the thing and those are the scenes that I love to shoot the most, that's when I do a very intimate close-up where I can... the actor can... we can really communicate some truthfulness about this scenario, this character, something that feels honest and real and those are generally the shots where that will be the only thing in it, the face. When I was a film student, which I fell into sideways, I thought I was going to become an English teacher because I had to do something practical, but I just fell in love with my elective module, film studies, and being in that dark room all day and not knowing what they were going to show us. They showed us these films I'd never heard of as a working-class woman with just two TV channels at home. My film education to that point was very limited: my dad liked Westerns, my mother might like the odd musical, we watched horror films at the weekend. The range of films I saw as a film student was a revelation to me and I totally fell in love with them, but I think, in particular, I fell in love with the close-up, because I was watching these films in the cinema and I had a really great professor – Sam Rohdie - who only ever showed us great films. The experience is totally different watching a film in the cinema, in the magical space that is a cinema, than it is watching it at home on a bad television, which is the only place I ever really saw films before that. I'd only been to the cinema a handful of times before that in my life, so when he showed us Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc and those close-ups, that massive face, it's like the people on-screen are gods, the whole thing takes place in this hyperreality and its impossible to watch Jeanne d'Arc in the cinema and not be really moved because
that's the most naked human interaction, looking at someone's face. You can't look at someone's face in the real world either, if they're crying or having a moment of emotional honesty, if someone is nakedly being human and you are looking at their face you cannot help but empathise with them and what that film does, it refuses to let you gloss over her feelings. It is a spectacle, but it is a spectacle in a small-focused way, which is expanded into this huge image. The spectacle of the fire doesn't matter we don't need to see them lighting it. We see the smoke, but what matters is her face and what she's going through. It doesn't give people the opportunity to be vicarious, they're refused the opportunity to be ghoulish, they have to engage with the humanity of the situation and that's what's brilliant about it. And then we watched Vivre Sa Vie in which Anna Karina has the same moment, we're watching her watch Jeanne D'Arc and I'm in the cinema watching her watching Jeanne D'arc and it's this triptych, this communication that was open-ended. There was Renée Jeanne Falconetti in the 20s, then Anna Karina 1962, and me in 2000 and we were all speaking to each other and not just the communication of their emotions to me and understanding how they feel, but also of cinema communicating with itself. What was your preparation with actors in terms of rehearsal? Did you address your actor to act instinctively or did you methodically structure the process? In particular, how did you develop the characters of Mary and Mark? We didn't really have rehearsal. The day before the shoot, a couple of hours. Dorothy, who plays Mary, was living in Donegal at the time, just home from London, and we were shooting just outside Belfast. I spoke to her on the phone before she was cast and we talked about the character then and I could tell that we were going to get along for this, that she got it, and then I didn't see her again until the shoot. I didn't need to, I knew we were on the same wavelength. Luke would have got more to grips with his character, because he read in for all the other Mary auditions, but we didn't really rehearse. For all Luke's age... he is an accomplished wee actor. He is intelligent and insightful. He gets things. He can read subtext. He's easy to communicate and work with in that respect. Even very complex things he understands, so he was no harder to work with than many adults I've worked with. He's focused and diligent and professional and he cares about creating good work. I rehearsed with Dorothy the night before the shoot – we stayed over in the location, a deerkeeper's lodge in the country - but there was no Luke. Then we rehearsed while we set-up. There wasn't really a lot of time,
but I spoke to them all in a good deal of depth in advance: who the character was, what I wanted to get from it, and Dorothy, Charlie, Luke – Charlie who I had worked with before – are people I can communicate with very easily. They understood what I was trying to get. Mary is a complicated character with a fragile mind. Her desire to order and control life becomes so great that she loses control of herself, committing an act of pure animal fury: the murder of her child. The child is the ultimate embodiment of her dilemma; he is, at once, entirely of her, from her, an extension of her being, but he is not hers to control, just as we are all part of Nature, but separate from it and from each other. He is a constant reminder that she lost control of her body in his conception, in her pregnancy, and through his whole young life. Even once she has exerted her will over the child, she has achieved nothing. The Mother's Dilemma is rarely explored, but, when it is, it is done so through horror. The Babadook foregrounded a
mother's psychosis from grief and the toll it takes on her relationship with her young son. The first series of True Detective introduced antinatalist themes to the public with references to the philosophy of Emil Cioran and the horror writing of Thomas Ligotti. In David Lynch's Eraserhead, Harry is forced to care for an infant he cannot love and whose very presence repulses him. And, yet, representations of motherhood tend to play to the notion of innate love and innate nurturing: Rosemary still loves her baby, even though he is Satan's offspring; Katherine still loves Damian in The Omen; Christine Penmark will do anything to protect and coddle her daughter, even though Rhoda is The Bad Seed. The darker horror – or the hardest for us to believe – is not the evils that parents excuse out of love for a supernaturally wicked child, but that a parent – a mother especially – may not be able to love – in fact, may destroy – a naturally innocent child. It is a harsh truth that we are not all capable of giving up our lives for others.
interviewThat complexity is contrasted with the simple innocence of Mark: he's just a little boy who wants his mother to be happy and to love him, but he also wants to do the things that little boys want to do: play and get dirty and live. It's not his fault that he's a source of Mary's fear and anxiety about the world, but yet he is. Childer is pervaded with images rich with symbolic values: how much importance does play the use of metaphors in your work? I like to make all the images work for their space on the screen. I'm very economical about what I shoot. I don't shoot stuff that I'm not going to use. I don't shoot reams of stuff. There was only one thing shot for Childer that didn't make it in and I wasn't sure that I should have been doing it in the first place and that's a scene where she's chopping up red cabbage... at the beginning of the film she explains that children from a cabbage patch at the bottom of the garden. It was fine, but I don't think it did enough for the story and the world and the film, so it didn't make it in, but, for the most part, I shoot what I need to shoot, because I see the film in my head before I get on the set. An example of this would be the scene where Mark is drowned in the bath where the camera, rather than staying there and watching that happen it does what we don't expect it to do, which is back off down the stairs and focus on a bowl of bobbing apples – it's Hallowe'en, apples in a bowl, but it's also a visual metaphor for what just happened upstairs. It's a euphemism and, indeed, there is much around motherhood that is euphemistic, that is talked around but is avoided, so in this darkest moment of her time as mother we avoid the thing itself and yet it is intimated by the distant sounds of struggle, then illustrated starkly with the apples bobbing like a lifeless body in the water. Apples are of the earth, like the cabbages, like we've already suggested children are. I think it's pretty hard to analysis your work in that way. Plenty of things like that I work out afterwards, I've intuited it during the process. For me, with that shot, I was mostly bored to think of shooting him actually being drowned. I didn't choose not to shoot that struggle that because I thought it was ghoulish – I don't mind ghoulishness – I didn't want to shoot it because it was boring, we've seen it, it would be a nothing moment. I didn't want to have a moment where people – even if they
thought it looked good – to disengage. I wanted to take that moment, which is the climax of the film and have people be surprised, to be forced to engage because I surprised them. There'd be no point in making the film at all if my only aim was to film it competently. That's just telling a story, that's not communicating an emotional truth. It is about making... asking the audience... coercing the audience to feel a certain way or to invite them to them think about it, really think about it. Women drown children in the bath all the time, it's not uncommon, but we don't really like to think about and when we do think about it we cast those women as complete villains. I don't think that will solve the problem that women sometimes kill their children. So the camera walks away and we do too, but, in contrast to that, the audience don't want to walk away, they want to see the grisly thing happen, so, when the camera moves away, they have to think about it – Why is that happening? And then, later, the drowning is mirrored by Mary submerging herself in the bath. She is under the water, testing herself, she is completely out of shot and then she returns to the shot gasping – that is what David Lynch would call a 'happy accident.' I wanted to get Mary coming out of the water and, just to cover myself, I decided to shoot her before she goes into the water, then coming out. We did that several times and that was the one that Dorothy thought wouldn't make it because she inhaled some water. I didn't call cut and she was expecting me – I called cut much sooner in earlier takes – but I didn't and she kept going and I knew instantly that that was the one to use. My only worry was that her moment under the water wasn't long enough, so what I did in the edit room was just cut into that and freeze-frame so it looks like she was under there longer than she actually was and I wanted to make it uncomfortably long. I wanted the audience to think is she going to... she is at least attempting to feel what it is like to drown, but then she couldn't and she comes up gasping. Cinema has been for more than half a century the reign of collective memory: nonetheless, only the most courageous filmmakers have tried to get under the skin of film like psychologists investigates the subconscious dimension. How much importance does play the subconscious level in your work? I have a lot of faith in happy accidents and the subconscious. Sometimes I make decisions about things and I don't realise why until it becomes obvious why and that happens to me a lot, where I will just feel that something is right for a character
to say or feel or do or wear or something and then it will turn out to be resonant, like it should always have been like that, and that's my subconscious. That's true of the characters too: the subconscious is always playing its part. For example, it feels like the childer are a manifestion of some subconscious part of Mary. I think that my one regret in Childer is that I didn't make it obvious that Mark doesn't see the childer until he finally does and that's shortly toward the end of his life. Dorothy doesn't live in our world, I didn't want it to be our world. It's a different world where things are a little bit different. It's like an adult transplanted into a children's fairytale. If you just had pictures it would look really nice – it's a nice house, Mary is a nice, well-presented mother or appears to be, Mark is well-fed and his clothes are clean, but actually modern adult life is not like that, so it's a heightened world, it's other, it's a world where children come from a cabbage patch at the bottom of the garden, which is something Irish parents tell their
children to avoid talking about sex – euphemism again. It is a world of gross euphemism. The thing about Mary's personal struggle, it's not against motherhood as such or femininity or anything like that, it's against nature as a total thing. Werner Herzog said: "Nature here is vile and base. I see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. The trees here are in misery and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing. They just screech in pain.” That's Mary. On the one hand, all of us as human beings are cognisant, logical, rational, we like to think of ourselves like that, but we are inextricable from our organic mess, from nature, from our blood and guts, from dirt, we are a product of that, in a primordial way. So Mary is so, so clean, but you can never be clean really. She has an inherent disgust at nature and what it did to her, because she, her body does things beyond her control. She conceived and had a child - she didn't want to do that. She wants to control everything but you can't control the natural functions of your body and you can't live without that, so that is her core issue. So, she had a baby, she gave birth - to her that is disgusting. She has
almost sexual dreams about being in the forest at night, again that's just her body and it comes out at night when she sleeps. It can't be controlled. In this way, Childer is essentially a horror film in that its primary driving emotion is, not only the horrific act of infanticide and forcing us to contemplate infanticide, but also the experience of horror of the central character. She is not a final girl, she is not acted upon by horrific forces – she is the monster, but she is a monster who is compelled by her own feeling of horror by everything around her. Everything is a manifestation of her subconscious. Everything in that world is... everything that she finds repellent becomes physical. Mary is afraid of death, but she is also appalled at life. I have a thing where I don't like to feel my blood pulsing in my veins. I can't bare to have things touch the arteries in my neck. I'm not nearly as anxiety-ridden as Mary, but that's the sense that she has. She's a human consciousness, tethered to this meat package; she can't stand it, but she doesn't want to be separated from it either, as she's afraid of death too. It's a central human conundrum, the rational mind vs the organic self. The whole thing is about control, how much you are able to control, Mark is simultaneously part of her, because he has come from her body, but he is a separate thing, so there are questions of how much she can control him, how much she can control the world that he is in, because she is driven to, she does feel obliged to do what is best for him, to put him first, but part of that means turning over control of his life to him as well, which seems far too risky. The only response she can give to the unruliness of nature, to the waywardness of the world, is to exert control, but the best thing for the child, eventually, is to turn control over to him, but she can't do that because the things that he wants to do that are wrong are the things that wrest control from her. Mary does the most animal thing that she could ever do, which is kill her young, but that's the only way that she can erase the threats to her world and her control over that world and the reminder of her own base, organic body. 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? In particular, do you think that your being a woman provides your artistic research with some special value?
I think my just being a human give my artistic research special value. I think everybody has things to say, a unique perspective. Some people are better at communicating these things. Everybody feels the world in a very real way, not everybody is able to communicate that so it translates, but everybody has that. I think it's completely impossible for me to extricate the fact that I'm a woman from my work or anything or my thoughts. That's what I am. I couldn't tell you what difference it would make if I wasn't a woman. I know that my experiences were different to my male relatives and contemporaries and that was bound to influence me, but I couldn't pinpoint exactly what. Certainly in Ireland, if you're a working-class woman and you sound like you're a working-class woman people don't listen to you as much, particularly me who was a teenage mother at 17, people didn't think that I had anything interesting to say, so a lot of the time I just wouldn't say anything, I would just watch and observe and absorb. I always had thoughts, I was always thinking but people thought I didn't have anything to contribute and it was only when I was older and had more confidence that I started to share. I was always having the conversation in my head, I just wasn't included in it. You can see that in our old home videos. After my father died, my mother dug out some of the old home movies that we had. I was – aside from my mother who used the video camera a lot, I was probably next in line. We had it when I was about 9 or 10, I was totally fascinated by it. I recorded a decent amount of stuff on that – interviews with family members. Silly things. Again, it was always observing – I would walk around with the camera and surprise people and they would close the door in my face. There is just something about the camera as a mechanical eye that felt like a friend somehow. But, when my mother found the home videos, I don't think any of the ones I made were kept, I think they were all probably taped over. I would have used tape and it would have been taped over. And there was one tape in particular that was probably 15 full minutes of my brother who was 14 at the time playing his guitar, which he'd only just learned how to play, he wasn't very good, and my mother is saying “Wow, Niall! You're brilliant!” and being encouraging. On one or two occasions during that 15 minute span, you can tell I'm behind the camera because I try to speak and say something and my mother tells me to shut up. And in another video, myself and my sister try to tell my mother something while she's filming and we're told to shut up. And Tara actually tries to intervene on my behalf and says “But mammy, look at what Aislinn did” and my mother doesn't want to know. That's something I learned from being a woman and being an Irish woman and
even when there are female characters who are at the forefront it's more about how that female affects the male than it is about the female herself as a three-dimensional person. So we've all spent our entire lives watching films that were led by males, told from a male perspective, generally had a male protagonist. Strangely enough, not horror films, which are very often female – final girl or whatever – but, otherwise, we spend a whole lifetime doing that and it teaches you, you're forced to put yourself into the shoes of those characters – and they're very often the same or similar characters – again and being a working-class woman, because I was trained to allow other people to have the centre-stage to facilitate to make tea and to help and to not hog the limelight. Little girls should be seen and not heard, so I learned how to fully empathise with other people and, on the one hand, that's made me empathetic to a fault, but it also helps me create more resonate human stories. I think that that is something that makes me as a female filmmaker different to male film-makers: so many stories have been from the perspectives of men, especially in films, from the male perspective and very often with a male protagonist,
again and again. Women have spent their lives having to do that, so it's second nature, whereas men – not all men – are very resistant, they find it hard to empathise with the film, they've never had to do that and put themselves in a completely different experience and I think that is a shame to them. It can only enrich you if you put yourself in other people's shoes. I've spent my whole life doing that as an exercise, trying to really imagine what it is like to be someone else and I wouldn't let myself stop until I felt I really got a sense of what that felt like, so it's one of the reasons that I'm fascinated with the extremes of human behaviour – serial killers, etc. – because I find it hard to put myself there. I know that all humans are motivated, all human do things that are rational at the time, that are motivated at the time, no one acts like a cardboard villain, not even the worst people in the world. Everyone is the hero of their own story and I find it very interesting to try and put myself in their position and try and find out how they feel like that. Everybody feels like that, always have done, always will. The concept of sonder is totally alien to me, I've been always been
really aware that everyone out there has their own world that is as complete as mine. So that idea the people get surprised by that, I actually find quite scary, that people are walking around not realising that they are just one little ant in the anthill and that everyone is as important as them, everybody else has as rich a life as them, everyone has their hopes and wants and dreams and memories, from the lowliest shepherd to a king, everybody has that. They are all the hero of their own story, man or woman, although I think, as a woman, I am more conscious of that, perhaps to a fault. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Aislinn. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Something I'm working on now which would be very dear to my heart would be a film called The Devil's Doorway, that's my first feature film, at this moment in time in postproduction, just going though a sound mix and grade, which will hopefully be going out in some form in the next year. I also have a script in development with Northern Ireland Screen and Farah Abushwesha at Rocliffe, who was nominated for a BAFTA this year, who is someone I'm very excited and interested to work with. That is a horror film that has a lot of these themes of birth and motherhood. It's a pretty Gothic tale set on an Irish island which has a lot of scope for being beautiful, because everything in the Irish countryside is beautiful, especially the coast, but there is also a darkness, there's a threat in the landscape of Ireland, it's not soft rolling green hills, its sublime: crashing waves and rocky outcrops and fox traps. It's dangerous. That builds in a lot of themes. It's essentially about motherhood and belonging and feeling like you don't. Other projects: I'm working with a company called Boudica who also worked on Carol Morley's The Falling that I have a lot of respect who have taken me on to write and direct their upcoming film The Crossing which is a thriller set on a refugee boat coming from Turkey to Greece. I'm at the writing stage with that, so the hope is that that will go into production sometime next year. Most imminently, I'm making a music video for the brilliant Alana Henderson. who is a fellow Northern Irish woman, a great singer and cellist, this week.
Emma Piper-Burket meets I have visited Iraqi Kurdistan regularly since 2009, encountering the many dramatic shifts in fortune that have swept through the region since that time. In the course of my visits, and journeys back home to Europe or North America, I became increasingly interested in the politics of what is “allowed” to be shown from certain parts of the world. There appears to be programming and media space for only certain kinds of stories from conflict regions like Iraqi Kurdistan. Interest is focused on either commodified stories of suffering, or inspirational stories of perseverance in spite of that suffering. Everything in between, the lives and moments that cannot be glorified or pitied, is completely absent. When looking at content about women, this absence of normality is even more severe: women are either oppressed or are strongly independent and actively fighting that oppression. This omission of normality feels dangerous; it makes us relate to entire nations and populations as symbols rather than individuals. In reality, these places we see on the news are made up of individual people with hopes and dreams remarkably similar to our own, despite widely differing external circumstances. I made Dream City to share an alternate approach to a region we hear much but actually experience little of in the news. Dream City is Iraqi Kurdistan as I have experienced it over the years. Diana is my friend, I visited her and we made a film together- this is the experience that I am sharing with you now. Emma Piper-Burket
Hello Emma and welcome to this special edition of Women Cinemakers: before starting to elaborate about your artistic production would you like to tell us something about your background? You have a solid formal training: you hold a MFA in Cinema and Digital Media from FAMU in Prague and you also nurtured your eduction with a BA in Arabic and Classical Studies, that you received from Georgetown University: how did these experiences influence your evolution as a filmmaker and a creative? Hi! Thank you. From a very young age I knew I would be a filmmaker, but I didn’t feel a need to rush towards it in a professional capacity. I spent a lot of my growing up years in a rural environment and had so much freedom to explore my creative ideas. My mom is an artist also and we had a barn full of supplies to actualize basically any project, so there was a lot of experimentation and exploration. I’m meets An interview by Bonnie Curtis and Jennifer Rozt Druhn Emma Piper-Burket realizing now what an impact this environment, and also the natural world has had on my thought process; this idea of cycles of growth- times to gather nutrients, times to blossom, times to withdraw and hibernate- has given me an appreciation for process that I really value. My undergraduate time at Georgetown was extremely helpful in shaping my understanding of how the world works on a larger socio-political level. I studied abroad my junior year in Cairo, living in Egypt for that year was a crash course all of that as well. Privilege, class structures and how history shapes the present is all so heightened there- it gave me a new perspective and way of understanding the world that has definitely influenced my creative work as well. After some years I enrolled in the MFA program at FAMU because I did want to deepen my formal understanding of my craft. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would suggest to our readers to visit http://emmapiperburket.com in order to get a synoptic view of your work. In the meanwhile, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up? Filmmaking for me is a multidisciplinary process. My writing on film, the tactile objects that inspire me, the material and equipment that I use to create
pieces all contribute to my greater filmmaking project. I really love the gathering and research phase of new work. I can get completely lost in it. Whether I’m working on a documentary or something more fictional, each piece has to involve a process of discovery and exploration. I want to learn something and collaborate with my material and subject matters, that interaction is really critical for me. I am not one of those filmmakers who envisions something and then needs to manifest that vision- I have huge respect for the mastery that that entails, but for me personally it’s uncovering the elements of chance and surprise that feel the most precious. You are a versatile filmmaker and your works often incorporate societal trends, ancient history, science, politics, as well as the natural world: do you think that your being a woman provides your artistic research with some special value? It’s hard to generalize between men and women because each individual is so unique, but if I think personally about how being a woman affects my work, again I go back to process and cycles and having patience for all the parts of each step along the way. As women, each month we go through a transformation: at some points we are more sensitive or more deeply affected by our emotions, at other points we are more attuned to the world around us or feel more ready to tackle whatever comes our way. There is an ability to ride the waves of emotion and external circumstances, and to understand the highs and lows of those waves without attaching to them, that I attribute to my gender. I think also as women we are expected to absorb a lot of energy from the outside. It can be attention or judgement or expectations or needs that come from people close to us, family, lovers, friends but also society interview
as a whole. I’m not sure most men have to go through that in the same way, society gives them more room to exist in their own way, usually they are praised for it. Part of growing up for me has been learning how to silence that outside noise and focus on my own truth, to not always give what is expected, but what is authentic. This plays out in my work as well, recognizing that tension between knowing how things are supposed to be done and what feels authentic to me as an artist and human being. For this special edition of Women Cinemakers we have selected the Dream City, an interesting film that our readers have already started to admire in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of your feminist commentary on the ways one can be dehumanized is the way you provided the visual results of your analysis with autonomous aesthetics: while walking our readers through the genesis of Dream City, would you shed light to your main sources of inspiration? I had been traveling to Iraq, mainly Iraqi Kurdistan, for many years for a larger documentary project about agriculture and the origins of wheat. Each time I would come back people would ask me with a kind of shock and awe about what it was like there. Didn’t I feel unsafe? I wanted to make something that reflected my actual experience being there. A lot interview
of time is spent waiting, sitting with people, sharing space, it’s not dramatic. Sometimes it’s boring, sometimes it’s silly, sometimes it’s sad. From the news we don’t get to see depictions of the Middle East that are free from drama, it’s not marketable I guess. But the reality is that the whole range of human experience that exists in North America or Europe, also exists there. When I met Diana, she told me that she wanted to be an actress, for a couple of years we talked about making a film together, but we didn’t really know what it would be. When she told me that she had moved away from home to another city so that she could study to be a flight attendant I thought that was an interesting starting point. I went to film in March 2014 and the plan was to return a year later and film some fictions sequences of Diana’s hope and dreams: what would it look like if everything she wanted came true? What about if it all went terribly wrong? When I got there in March 2015, it was after ISIS had invaded, the conflict, the economic troubles in the region all made for a very different atmosphere than when I was there before. It didn’t feel right to fictionalize anything. Diana had moved back to her family’s house, she couldn’t find work, the power was out most of the time, she didn’t want to do anything so I just started filming. We filmed whatever was happening around and she talked to me about how she was feeling. The film ended up being an interplay between all of that and the optimism of the previous year. In the Dream City Diana builds a dream city in her mind: how would you consider the relationship between experience and imagination in the character of Diana?
interviewDream City is the name of a development project in Erbil. It was a massively ambitious project of apartment buildings and restaurants and stores that began in the mid-2000s and has been left unfinished for the past several years. I think anyone who knows how to dream has big ideas that take too long to finish, or get stalled out at various points, or are left abandoned. Diana has had plans to leave Iraq for many years, occasionally she will go to Turkey or try something else, but then she returns back. It is not always easy to actualize our dreams. We all have things we hope for, things we don’t want. The path to actualization is not always so clear, even if the things we hope for are quite simple. Sometimes the promise of the dream is so big that we forget the steps to actualization are usually quite small and mundane. Escaping from traditional narrative form, Dream City features a brilliant storytelling: how did you develop the script and the structure of the film? The structure developed organically through the editing. I knew I wanted to end the film with the power coming back on in Diana’s house, the return of the electricity is this simple thing that shifts her entire mood, and life is so often like that, right? We are most often affected by the small day to day things, not the dramatic ones. For the rest of the piece, I vaguely structured it as a continuous day, with excursions into the past, or trains of thought about different aspects
of Diana’s life. It was important to me to not make a film that gave audiences a feeling of authority over the world they encountered onscreen. I wanted to share the experience without creating any new “experts” on life in Iraqi Kurdistan. So often what we see from that part of world is meant to explain facts and create this monolithic truth, so I purposely avoided anything that could be used as a talking point and instead focused on the elements that were more experiential. For Dream City you have combined footage shot over several years and we have appreciated the the film’s expressive color palette, stunning widescreen compositions: why did you use three different shooting formats including the legendary Krasnogorsk-3 film camera? The idea driving much of this piece is that our reality is shaped by what we think of as much as what is happening around us in the actual world, so the different shooting formats helped destabilize the sense of any one reality. I wanted to create an exchange between reality and thought, I used the 16mm footage with her voiceover to create a different kind of distance between the actions we see on screen and Diana’s words. Often the 16mm footage is something that we have already seen (or will see) that was shot with a DSLR camera. I love the Krasnogorsk-3 because it’s so hefty, you can do anything to it— like cross a river or climb a mountain. We can recognize an effective sociopolitical criticism in the way Dream City inquiries into events that affect our unstable contemporary age. Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once
stated, "the artist’s role differs depending on which part of the world you’re in. It depends on the political system you’re living under". Not to mention that almost everything, ranging from Caravaggio's Inspiration of Saint Matthew to Joep van Lieshout's works, could be considered political, what could be in your opinion the role of Art in the contemporary age? I strongly believe that art is a critical tool for engaging with, understanding, and synthesizing the world around us. In it’s highest form, art offers the possibility to change our perspective in the most fundamental of ways. That is the power of it. For me it feels irresponsible to create work that does not have some political aspect to it, that said, often my approach is from an angle that is not always overtly political. So I’m glad the political criticism within Dream City came through to you, because you could say it is film about friends, an actress and a filmmaker therefore it’s an apolitical film about Iraq. But an American taking a camera to a country that my country once invaded is an inherently political act, I am coming there and able to leave whenever I want, filming my friend who has limited possibilities to leave and live elsewhere. Together we can record some of her experience and my experience being there with her. We can share that experience with an audience from the outside, but there is an imbalance that will always exist. Between me and her, between me and you and between you and her- but even with that imbalance we can also recognize the elements that we all share- the feelings of being frustrated
or inspired by hope, the ability to keep moving forward. I hope that this film can, even subconsciously, help create an awareness about all of the layers of these things. Dream City has been screened in several occasions and one of the hallmarks of your approach is the capability to create direct involvement with the viewers, who are urged to 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 of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decisionmaking process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context? To be very honest, I do not think about the audience very much when I am making a film. When I am shooting, I film the things that I find beautiful, or intrigue me, or make me feel something or think something. When I am editing, it’s the same; I select the scenes and shots that create for me the strongest feelings and I put them together in a way that makes sense. I hope and trust that if I feel something, others will too. I made this film because I wanted to share my experience, if I shaped that experience by what I thought people would think while watching, I would no longer be creating something authentic to my experience. So much of what we see is made to conform to expectations or standards that were established a long time ago, it really limits the depth and full range of human thought and emotion. To me the most interesting <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< <
work throughout film history comes from the pieces the do not adhere to any specific guidelines- not pieces that intentionally break the rules, but the ones that never considered them in the first place. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Emma. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? I just finished my first feature film script, I guess it could be best described as social realist science fiction. I hope to shoot it next year in Los Angeles. I’m also editing the documentary I mentioned earlier about agriculture, archaeology and food sovereignty in Iraq, it’s very experimental, incorporating hand drawn animation, archival material and plants, I’ve structured it like an archaeological dig, each scene is another layer of this complex history of how our global food system developed and the way humans use and misuse the land that sustains us. I have a lot of small experimental documentaries I call “Curiosities” that I work on in between it all. I enjoy treading the line between both fiction and documentary filmmaking. I also frequently write about film for various publications, I really appreciate having a chance to reflect on the craft of filmmaking and how it fits into the broader socio-political climate. All of my work together: the writing, the filmmaking, photography, is an investigation of the structures that shape our world, keeping a constant eye on how those structures affect the human spirit— these structures are ever-evolving so I suppose my work can evolve right alongside it! Thanks so much for your time.
Upside Down (2014) Amira Daigle
UPSIDE DOWN is the third short film of my trilogy. The lead character, Gigi, was inspired by one of the people profiled in a documentary I saw about adults coming out late in life. I was moved by her story and then based a character loosely on her. Another element in this film is my own background as a child of divorce. In that regard, UPSIDE DOWN is in part a personal film. My trilogy is about people often marginalized in our society. The films are my small way of trying to shine light on these people – to make their humanity visible to those who ignore or never notice them in the street I began making films relatively late in life, after years of writing screenplays. I was teaching screenwriting at a film school. My students all had to make short films as part of their program. I thought that if they could do it, perhaps I could too. Hence, my first short film, LAST DAY, came to be. I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but that one short film morphed into a trilogy: LAST DAY, OLD JUNK, UPSIDE DOWN. Clearly the experience doing the first film was challenging and rewarding in a way that prompted me to do it again… and again…. Once the last short film was done I realized that my next challenge needed to be a feature film. I knew there would not be much money so I had to write a script that could be done on a shoe-string budget. The result is STARFISH, filmed in September 2016 and currently in postproduction. STARFISH is more personal than the other feature screenplays that I wrote. My initial impulse to write it came from the grief I experienced after the death of my father and the death of our rescue dog three years later. The script evolved over the years but loss, grief and healing remain at its core. As a writer and filmmaker, I am attracted to stories about people and that contain the humor and sadness that is part of life. Lives and works in New York City, USA Shira Levin Shira Levin
is a captivating film by Shira Levin that initiates her audience into a highteneed still balanced visual experience. We are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her artistic production. Hello Shira and welcome to : you are a versatile video artist: would tell us something about your background? In particular, how did your prevous experiences as actress screenplays writer influence your trajectory as a creative? Theatre was my first love. I studied acting for many years and performed since I was twelve. Ironically, it was my love of acting that brought me to writing and then to film. While performing in Summer Stock one summer, I read Anne Tyler’s first novel, which I loved. I loved one of the characters and wanted to play her. I also thought that the book would make a good film. So, I decided to option the book although I knew meets An interview by Francis Quettier and Dora Tennant Shira Levin absolutely nothing about writing for film or what optioning a book entailed, particularly one written by a famous author. With the help of my father, who had invested some money for me, I was able to pay for an option on the book. I then set out to write a screenplay. My only knowledge of how to do this was from books I read on the subject as well as my own vision of what I imagined the film could be. I showed my first draft to a friend who was involved in the film business and he liked it. Because he had some connections in the industry and knew more about screenwriting than I did, we joined forces to rewrite the script together. Perhaps due to my background in acting, I had a feel for character and dialogue as well as “radar” for things that did not ring true. He was much better with structure, something I knew little about. Eventually, our script was optioned by American Playhouse, a wonderful program on public TV that produced films based on the work of American writers. We were paid to develop the script further and they were gearing up to produce it. This was a thrilling thing for me although by that time, it was clear that my hopes of acting in the film were dashed. We had a director attached (Pete Masterson, who directed Trip To Bountiful) and some actors willing to commit to the lead role. Unfortunately, before we ever got into production, American Playhouse disbanded (I’m not
sure of the reasons behind this), and the film did not get made. I continued to study acting and performed but also wrote another screenplay. That script was chosen to be part of a new screenplay reading series being done at the Writers Guild of America, East. It was read by actors in front of an audience and was received well. However, I could not find anyone to produce it. I continued to write and began to realize that I enjoyed writing very much, perhaps more than acting. Eventually after having to acknowledge that I would not likely be able to earn a living as an actress, I landed in the film industry, first as an intern for well-known producers who had an office in New York City. That job led to my working at Universal Pictures (NY) for two years. During that time I continued to work on my scripts, one of them a romantic comedy loosely based on “Much Ado About Nothing.” Reading and evaluating scripts, manuscripts and plays was part of my job and I was learning a lot. One of the books I read while working at Universal was an Irish novella that I fell in love with. I decided to option it and turn it into a screenplay. My job at Universal led to my job working for Martin Scorsese’s company as his Director of Development. I continued to learn an enormous amount and worked with writers and directors on their material while at this job. While I was working there, the screen adaptation that I wrote of the Irish novella was optioned and put into development by a small company based in Europe. I worked with the director who had been brought onto the project on the revisions but once again, for whatever interview