ALBA MORÍN KRISTEN BROWN ADALI TORRES SARAH BETH WOODS DASCHA ESSELIUS PAULINE PASTRY HEIKE SALZER FUMI GOMEZ CRISTIANA FORTE HLUMELA MATIKA w o m e n INDEPENDENT WOMEN’S Hlumela Matika CINEMA
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04 The Strong Black Woman 32 SHE.TEMA.OH 54 Box 80 Krummi 104 La limite élastique 138 The Brainstorm 168 Hear The Glow of Electric Lights 194 Partir 222 Modoc 248 TrAuM Hlumela Matika Cristiana Forte Fumi Gomez Heike Salzer Pauline Pastry Dascha Esselius Sarah Beth Woods Adali Torres Kristen Brown Alba Morín Contents
Hello Hlumela 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 and after having An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant [email protected] earned your undergraduate Degree from the South African School of Motion Picture and Live Performance in Cape Town, you started your career in both the South African and International Film Industry: how did these experiences influence your evolution as a creative? I obtained my BFA at AFDA (The South African School of Motion Picture and Live Performance) in Hlumela Matika Women Cinemakers meets Lives and works in Syracuse, Upstate New York Hlumela Matika is a Fulbright Graduate film maker from South Africa who now lives and studies in Syracuse, Upstate New York. She obtained her undergraduate Degree from the South African School of Motion Picture and Live Performance (AFDA) in Cape Town and has working experience in both the South African and International Film Industry. She has also worked as a Stage Manager for the Isango Portobello Theatre Ensemble. Her passion lies in investigating and cultivating the African aesthetic in Cinema. In approaching the project her interests lied in topics that are often dehumanized because of one sided political and economic stigmas, often perpetuated by the media. As an immigrant in the USA herself, the topic of displacement and assimilation to a new culture was a natural gravitation and interest. She has also worked closely with the Syracuse Refugee community, talking to locals about their experiences in the USA. These conversations meant unravelling and discussing on a personal level the global discourse and political challenges the USA is experiencing in the current times but also maybe even most importantly what that means on a day to day basis for an immigrant currently in the country.
Women Cinemakers 2008 and went on to work in the film service industry in Cape Town. I worked as a runner, driving negatives from set to the lab, which led to a production assistant position (PA) for a TV drama, which meant a little more responsibility. I was adamant on being a producer, so I stuck with it, exploring the different departments. I learned as much as I could and the opportunity taught me discipline, alongside patience with my own growth and development. It was invaluable access to International and local productions, I could witness the inner working components of industry projects. I became interested in how everything came together. After a few years of that, my focus took a shift towards theatre, which offered the possibility to explore a very different medium of expression. This interest led to work with an opera company, Isango Portobello, as a stage manager. In the two years I worked with the company, I was given the unique opportunity to explore theatrical lighting, set design, and even performance with the company at the Globe Theater in London, my first professional experience performing for a paying public! This was the first time where I felt creatively activated, the company worked as a collective in writing and producing their South African story lines. They encouraged everyone’s creative voice and I felt inspired by this communal way of working. I think compared to my initial experience in the commercial film industry, where I felt like a cog in a machine that was much larger than me, with this theatre company I could comment on the direction of the work and those comments would be interview
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers taken into consideration. The director of the company remains a great inspiration and a valued mentor. After working with the company in this way, I knew I wanted to continue in this creative direction and produce my own work. I applied to the Fulbright Program and I am now at Syracuse University –the school of Visual and Performing Arts (VPA), where I am currently undertaking my MFA in Film. The program is within the transmedia department and encourages cross-disciplinary works, I work predominantly with film, video and performance. In particular, how does the relationship between your cultural substratum dued to your South African roots and your current life in the United States inform your current practice? Being a Xhosa woman from the Eastern Cape of South Africa, born in the late 80’s and raised in the 90’s I experienced both the apartheid and the post-apartheid South Africa. Witnessing a country redefine its trajectory and redesign its future, this allots me a specific perspective, that influences my experience of the world and how I approach my work. I moved to the USA, in 2016, during a time of turbulence around border control and immigration. I felt foreign; like I didn’t belong. The move reminded me of the history of migration, how things have or haven’t changed. Though, it also reminded me of why migration is forward progression. Being a mother to a 6-year-old, who now lives with my mother, back in South Africa, puts this into perspective. interview
I needed to go study but couldn’t take her with me for many reasons. I thought about that specific situation: what it means to leave a country to obtain a better future for your child. Similarly, this same dilemma had existed with my mother. I think back to when she was my age; we lived in the outskirts of the town, a distance from her work, she worked as nurse, during the apartheid era, working 12-hour shifts. I remember only seeing her on some weekends, because she’d be away during the day. Sometimes she would take the night shift which meant she’d only see us briefly in the mornings before we left for school. This is my childhood memory of her. I find myself now wondering, how have circumstances changed for women today? Displacement takes on so many forms, women for the longest of times had to leave their families to provide; leaving the kids with the grandparents, to go study, to go look after other families to earn money to raise their own families. I
think this is where my thought stems from; these situations of adversity that are masked as strength. This experience influenced the exploration of displacement through the woman’s point of view. That exploration informed my films The Strong Black Woman and Lalibela. It is, to some degree, a collective narrative representing the present and historical experience of immigration and displacement. For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected The Strong Black Woman, an extremely interesting project 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 insightful inquiry into the stereotypical assumption that Black Woman are strong is the way you have been capable of combining commitment with aesthetics: while walking our readers through the
Women Cinemakers genesis of The Strong Black Woman, what did address you to focus on this theme? The work started as a self-documentation project. I was interested in observing the physical distance between myself and my child, the emotional toll that distance took on my body and my spirit in addition to the longing I felt for her. I was consumed by loneliness and felt I couldn’t express that feeling of vulnerability. I couldn’t speak to my mother or sisters about the feelings I was experiencing without getting the response “Nyamazele” which means “endure.” This word “endure” is of interest to me because it means to withstand pain. This initiated my interrogation of the situations in which women are encouraged to endure. I think of how strength and endurance is synonymous with the history of women’s struggle to be seen, heard and treated equally. How adversity itself is used to perpetuate the role of Black women seen as “the mules of the world”. How the Black woman is not afforded the space to be vulnerable. I am inspired by thinkers and social shapers like bell hooks who writes in Talking Back; Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black - “It is not that black woman have not been and are not strong; It is simply that this is only a part of our story, a dimension, just as the suffering is another dimension- one that has been most unnoticed and unattended to are black woman’s human vulnerabilities.” Tamara Beauboeuf- Lafontant opens with this very same quotation in her book Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman and questions the role strength plays in isolating, oppressing and further silencing the black woman. In reading these works I was moved to make this project, find ways of cinematically represent these ideas in exploring my own relationship with strength and vulnerability. In regards to the aesthetics and composition of the film, I was inspired by the early 1900 paintings of Vilhelm Hammershoi (Interior In Strandgade), who documented a portrait series of women at home, in the living room, in the kitchen, sitting near a window. I was fascinated by these women seemingly mysterious, in that they faced away from the artist, though, I was taken by how all the women depicted were white. I wanted to challenge the image and representation of those moments, by showing the complexity and internal struggle that exist in those moments of solitude. I wanted to show how strength can be a halftold tale in that the person portraying strength is also suppressing other human emotions. We have deeply appreciated the way The Strong Black Woman urges the viewers to question the inner complexity and human vulnerability: do you think that your being a woman provides your artistic research with some special value? Being a woman definitely adds to the work, in that I’m speaking of complexities and vulnerabilities that I’ve personally experienced. In making the work, I am, first and foremost, having a dialogue with myself. Then
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers actively having an ongoing dialogue with my mother, my daughter, my sisters, my female friends and my immediate community of women who identify with and experience this struggle. As a woman I am looking into the social construction of womanhood. I inspect its origin, question femininity, reject it and reconstruct it to better suit my values and to better serve how I exist in this world. I believe we’ve lived in a world where men (white) have defined what woman is, what femininity looks like, how women should behave and how we should be seen and when. I think for women this conversation goes deeper, in that, White women - also felt that they could oppress the Black woman. It is important for women to see each other and create their own narratives on how they would like to be seen, by escaping or inspecting the performance of strength and allowing for vulnerability to exist in the way we express ourselves. To emphasize the need of a point of convergence between direct experience and creative process, British artist Chris Ofili once remarked that "creativity's to do with improvisation - what's happening around you". How would you consider the relationship between the necessity of scheduling the details of a performance and the need of spontaneity? How much importance does play improvisation in your process? I value the balance of planning and spontaneity in how I work. The idea starts in my mind’s eye, usually the idea is influenced by something I’ve seen, heard or experienced. In that way I think the initial idea itself is spontaneous. I interview
Women Cinemakers nurture the idea with research, and the idea changes and takes on a fuller conceptual existence. There comes a point where I need to transfer the concept into reality; this depends on a lot of planning. For example, the Strong Black Woman project was shot by myself first, because I felt I needed to play around with the concept physically to understand how best to make the work. I would sit and film myself in many positions and experiment with different choreographies to express different ideas. After I had pinned down exactly what the actions would be I called on my collaborator Marianne Barthelemy, a talented female cinematographer, together we sat and planned the lighting design and how we would technically achieve the look of three women in one space. The performance, however, is all subject to the physical space I’ve created, even with the endless planning and plotting the performance is spontaneous, so I try create spaces that will induce the most honest performance. Chris Ofili also says, “There is a magic to playing entirely to who you are” and the performance is just that; it’s the moment I unravel the perceived self in search of the truest self and I aim to capture that in my work. We would like to introduce our readers to Lalibela: a captivating hybrid documentary/fiction short that can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eERU-vAcau0. We have appreciated the essential and at the same time effective shooting style, marked out with sapient use of statics: were your aesthetic decisions when shooting? In particular, how did you structure the storytelling for this interesting project? The film started as a narrative. I had worked on the script for months, gathering research from the community and writing a piece of work that I thought encompassed the immigrant experience, in Syracuse. I wanted to show the hardships in displacement and relocation, how language can act as a barrier. I also wanted to change how immigrants are represented. I wanted to empower the subject and create dialogue around the complexity of that experience. These were the objectives I set for myself. I worked on the film with Habiba Buro who relocated over 10 years ago. She now works at the Bantu Community Centre which assists with welcoming and helping resettle immigrants in Syracuse, New York, she is also looking at opening an Ethiopian restaurant in Syracuse. She plays Soria in the film, a fictional character. When I first spoke to Habiba about the character, she immediately resonated with the experience of looking for work and not being able to speak the English language. The feeling of not being heard is isolating when you are trying to express the most desperate part of you. She is Muslim and we spoke extensively about what that might mean for her family at work, in public and at home. A lot of these conversations molded the aesthetic choices in the film. We see Habiba (Soria) in a job interview, an
A still from Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers uncomfortable scene, where she is decoratively displaced, surrounded by white porcelain dolls, and she struggles to speak the English language. We never see or hear the interviewer. Soria is put on the spot; she is alone. She finds work at a bar/restaurant, she is very pregnant, and there is something simultaneously hopeful and desperate about that moment. Similarly, here we hear the crowd/restaurant-goers but never see them. The focus is on her experience, how she sees herself in these moments of victory, failure or opportunity. I wanted to focus on three elements of the immigrant experience; the English classroom as a space of opportunity, finding work as sense of victory, and the home experience as space of change. The second person is Yusuf Mohmad, whose character evolved organically in that his part was never scripted. He originally had a supporting role and during the production we developed a friendship. He spoke about the bullying he had endured at school. He asked me if I thought he was beautiful and this broke my heart, because I thought he was the most beautiful kid I’d ever seen. After much consideration on how I could have him be more of a central figure in the film, I decided on exploring his story of belonging, where he considered home to be. I wanted to show him in his new home and have him reflect on his old home. In doing so, I wanted him to watch the film and see how beautiful he was. So, I was very intentional in the close ups I framed him within interview
Women Cinemakers interview and the complimentary lighting. I wanted him to see himself as a super being, which explains the last shot of him in silhouette with a bright light from behind. I wanted him to be proud of his journey, his culture, the way he looked, I wanted him to understand that he brings part of the world with him, that this has real value and that he should celebrate his background. Your artistic inquiry is committed to social themes and you have had the opportunity to work with the Syracuse Refugee community, talking to locals about their experiences in the USA: 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". How do you consider the relationship between a political system and an artist's creative process? Moreover, what could be in your opinion the role of artists in our everchanging, unstable contemporary societies? For me the political is very personal; it influences the way I see and how I am seen. I cannot escape it so I face it. When I moved to the USA I realized how I was identified and categorized; I was a Black, South African immigrant on a J-1 visa. The visa has an expiration date, I can’t outstay this date, my time here is limited. These are the classifications on my passport. This is how I am seen by the passport control before I set foot on the country. This is how borders work everywhere. Access depends on which passport you hold. I am not seen as an individual, with a history, with a people, I’m not seen as my mother’s child, I
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers am part of a systematic breakdown. These are just some of the thoughts I had about my social and political standing; I am against this way of being seen. I am drawn to the social and political dialogue because I can begin to talk about these issues with my community, and my community is where I am located, my immediate surroundings, though foreign to the country there is always a shared experience that binds people together. It stems back to the philosophy of “Ubuntu” meaning humanity. The term is a Nguni philosophy and the phrase is often roughly translated as “I am because we are” this philosophy encourages a communal sharing and connectedness. I believe the artist cannot escape the socio-political because it is the role of the artist is to serve as an advisor, mediator, mirror/reflection, a healer and even a visionary in building this sense of connectedness in the community. I am not sure where my practice lies at the moment and maybe I am trying to find that answer here and now. That’s the journey I am on, discovering how I can best serve where I am. How I can use my films as a voice, like speech, like words, like feelings to express humanity. Moving from the relationship between the personal journey and social themes, your works often address the viewers to a wide number of narratives: rather than attempting to establish any univocal sense, you seem to urge the viewers to elaborate personal associations would you tell us how much important is for you that the spectatorship rethink the concepts you convey in interview
your pieces, elaborating personal meanings? How open would you like your works to be to be understood? It is important that I engage the audience in a journey, one that they have authorship on. In “Strong Black Woman” I am a vehicle; my physical body is split into three, I physically react and enact discomfort, self-judgment among many other emotions. The moments are silent, and the viewer has only the vehicle and themselves to fill in the gaps. The work hopefully gives them enough to go on, enough to create what they need to connect with the message of the work. It is very specific, and in its specificity, people are able to find themselves, in small and large parts of the presented narrative. I don’t believe in an absolute, as there are many nuances in experiences that make each experience different. I focus on my experiences in hopes that someone will recognize that within themselves. There’s something interesting in emotion because we can arrive at a universal emotion in many different ways, I aim to transport the audience to an emotion through their own, willing participation with the work. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Hlumela. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Currently, I’m working on a short narrative film “TAB” that is set to shoot in June/July of 2018, in my home country. Women Cinemakers interview
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers
The film is being sponsored by Panavision SA and the National Film and Video Foundation of South Africa. The project is based on my personal journey; a memory of my childhood, growing up with a father addicted to horse racing. The story follows two sisters at the brink of womanhood, when they realize they can only depend on each other to survive their father’s addiction. The topic of womanhood seems to be a topic I feel most excited by and I aim to explore it further. My films have been well received by the film community; “Lalibela” was screened at the Silicon Valley African Film Festival in 2017, at the African International Film Festival 2018 in Lagos, it was shorted listed for the Meraki Film Festival 2018 and I hope to keep the film in circuit as to reach as wide an audience as possible. Similarly, “The Strong Black Woman” has shown at group exhibitions in Syracuse and I would love for it to continue reaching diverse audiences in different exhibition spaces. I think a lot about how I would like my work to evolve, and ideally, I would like to create work that can exist both in cinema’s and in gallery spaces; works that can be viewed in community halls and simultaneously exist under academic discourse; narratives that are both socially impactful/moving but also narratives that open space to talk about issues existing in our contemporary societies. Women Cinemakers interview An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant [email protected]
Sapiently constructed and marked out with brilliant cinematography, SHE.TEMA.OH is a captivating work by filmmaker Cristiana Forte: shot in Tallin, Estonia, it tells the story of a 14 An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant [email protected] year old girl who lives with her alcoholic dad in the Russian suburbs, who is confronted with a beautiful woman on her way to Tara. Shot with elegance and inventiveness, SHE.TEMA.OH offers an emotionally complex visual experience, demonstrating the ability to capture the subtle depths of emotions and creating effective intimate narration: we are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to Cristiana Forte Women Cinemakers meets My career as director is just starting and the film you saw was my graduation thesis in the University of Tallinn, Baltic Film and Media School, Estonia. Since this is my first and only film I guess I still don't have a style or a subject that can define my work. Even though I believe that films have to be made for people and about people. They have to show us how is to live in other people shoes and make you more empathetic to their decisions, actions and problems. So if you want to tailor the interview I guess you can focus more on the experience of making the film about and in a foreign country. The film was based on my first impressions of how it is to live and grow in a country like Estonia, more particularly Tallinn. I liked the ideia of transforming something that doesn’t belong to us in something that could. In the film case it was not only about the list of affairs of the lady but also their country, their way of living.
Women Cinemakers Forte's captivating and multifaceted artistic production. Hello Cristiana and welcome to WomenCinemakers: before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would ask you some questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and you graduated from the University of Tallinn, Baltic Film and Media School, Estonia: how did this experience influence the evolution of your practice as a filmmaker? Moreover, could you tell us what are your biggest influences and how do they affect your artistic research? Thank you, it’s really nice to be featured in your magazine. Well, I started my degree in Portugal at The Catholic University of Porto, where I completed the first two years. Then I felt that the school wasn’t really fulfilling my needs so I found out about the Erasmus program that they had with BFM and I applied there. I was there for only one year and I graduated with this project. This year was one of the most important years of my life so far. I learned so much about filmmaking, teamwork and engaging with other cultures. I met amazing people there who helped me with the project like it was their own. Two of those people were Arvo Iho who started as my teacher and later became my supervisor and Kertu Viira, the producer of the project, interview
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers someone who is very responsible for the success of our project. Regarding my influences, I guess I’m still very obsessed with social realism in European cinema. When I first started to watch films I fell in love with Goddard and later on even more with Truffaut because of his Antoine Duhamel Adventures. Eventually, I watched one of the Dardenne Brothers’ film and a whole new world opened up before me. I was so amazed with the themes, the narrative, the cinematography, the way they build the emotional pact with the viewer… basically everything in every film. In Estonia I met the work of Veiko õunpuu, which was also a very big influence for the film. When it comes to Portuguese cinema, I guess “Mutantes” by Teresa Villaverde and all the work by João Salaviza really inspired my work, specially the way their characters are built, being intensely dramatic with their actions rather than dialogue. Nowadays, I am fascinated with Lucrecia Martel and her complex narratives full of details. Her movies are masterpieces in which every sound and gesture matters. For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected SHE.TEMA.OHA, a captivating 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/dVErbGMT3sI. What interview
has at once captured our attention of your clear approach to narrative is the way it provides the viewers with such a multilayered visual experience. While walking our readers through the genesis of SHE.TEMA.OHA, could you tell us what did attract you to this particular story? The film started with the idea of taking something personal from someone else’s life and making it your own. With the help of a classic narrative and the stimulation of what surrounded me, I started to build this story in which a girl would live in someone else’s shoes during a whole day. This multilayered visual experience was also necessary to have the viewers feeling themselves in someone else’s shoes, even though they are conscious that they are the audience and that this is just a film.
From a visual point of view, SHE.TEMA.OHA is elegantly composed and features sapient cinematography and keen eye for details: what were your aesthetic decisions when shooting? In particular, what was your choice about camera and lens? When I was planning the film, I was very inspired by the way the Dardenne Brothers shoot - the way the camera walks with the character like a shadow. In this film, I wanted that to happen when we were alone with girl, so we could get to know the girl better and better throughout the narrative. Whenever there were more characters I felt the need to step back, let the image breath and see how the audience interacts and reacts to it. Just like I said before, I pay a lot of attention to gesture, even though gesture is just a complementary element in many films. Since there is not a lot of dialogue, I wanted the small
Women Cinemakers gestures and reactions to speak for themselves. Technically speaking, we used the most flexible gear adjusted to shots with a lot of movement that was lent to us by the school. We have deeply appreciated your approach to narrative and the way you have balanced analytical research of your characters and the emotional aspect of the storytelling: what was your preparation with actors in terms of rehearsal? In particular, do you like spontaneity or do you prefer to meticolously schedule every details of your shooting process? After casting Teele, we started rehearsals right away. We almost had two months of rehearsals, about times a week. We focused more on rehearsing the main scenes (without props) in which there were a lot of details. This period gave us time and space to build the character and her smallest details, creating all her idiosyncrasies. Through the repetition of the scenes Teele found herself comfortable in the character, making her memorize every move so that when we were shooting, she had space to be more spontaneous. On set, I barely gave her any directions, and I was amazed with the way she dived in the character and gave so much to her without my intervention. interview
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers As you have remarked once, SHE.TEMA.OHA was based on your first impressions of how it is to live and grow in a country like Estonia, more particularly Tallinn. Would you tell us something about your being a foreigner has influenced your writing process? In particular, how important was for you to make a personal film, about something you personally experienced? Tallinn is a very special city and I was very lucky to end up going there. I wrote the script in my first couple of months living there. Being a foreigner in the city and not understanding what people were saying gave me the opportunity to observe more and interact less with what surrounded me. Basicly the film is based on my first impressions of how it is to live in that city. I saw how different people were from the Europe that I was used to and how two different cultures live parallel to each other (Russian and Estonian). This parallelism inspired me to write about this identity crisis which impacts an adolescent that is trying to find her place in society and living between this two worlds. Through the naiveness of her eyes I builded a metaphor where not only her is passing by a identity crises but also the country and city where she lives. SHE.TEMA.OHA has drawn heavily from the specifics of the Russian suburbs of Tallinn and we have highly appreciated the way you have created interview
Women Cinemakers such powerful resonance between the intimate qualities of ordinary locations and the atmosphere that floats around the story: how did you select the locations and how did they influence your shooting process? Considering I wrote the script in the first couple of months I lived in Tallinn, I wrote imagining the only places I knew, the places that I visited first. I chose this area (Lasnamae) because it is located in the borders of the Russian suburbs and the Estonian capital. Most of the locations were in the center of Tallinn, where people pass by everyday when they go to work or to school. I think when people from Tallinn see it they may have some kind of emotional bond because it’s a place they deal with on a daily basis. Addicionaly I chose this two different scenarios, where she lives and the city center, to make a contrast and to highlight the parallelism that I mentioned in the previous question.These days, it is nostalgic to me to see those locations on the film. We like the way your intimate close-ups created entire scenarios out of psychologically charged moments to communicate effective empathy: in SHE.TEMA.OHA you leave the floor to your characters, highlighting their mutual interactions and finding such brilliant ways to create a channel of communication between their epiphanic journey interview
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A still from Women Cinemakers