Cin wom 15 16 art cinema doc

NINA DJACIC EIJA TEMISEVA SILVIA LASMAR MENGXI RAO CHRYS ROCHAT BABI BARACHO PAROMITA DHAR CHERYLIN WILLIAMS DAPHNE CORONA PIÑERA

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CINEMA DOC THEATRE VIDEO ART DANCE

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Building on the success of the fourth edition, CinéWomen continues showcasing video practice from around the world. As the ultimate mirror-medium of our times, video is all around us. Despite the proliferation of mainstream cinema, independent films continue to be made –radical, poetic, and dreamlike films, whose directors work on the edge of the mainstream film industry, never restricting themself to any single field, yet inviting the eye and the mind to travel further. Cinema is no longer the monolithic system based on large capital investiment: in the last decade the technological advances have dramatically changed the economic conditions of cinema production. Revolutions arise from obstinacy.

It is not by chance that today one of the protagonists of the digital revolution in cinema is a talented and courageous woman director, Elle Schneider, co-founder along with Joe Rubinstein of the Digital Bolex Project, who after developing a cult-camera harking back to 16mm film aesthetic -a significant leap towards the democratization of technology- is now promoting an application process for a grant for producers employing women in their camera troupes.

Only eight percent of 2014's top-grossing films were directed by women: it's time to reverse this trend. However, cinema is not only technology, but ideas, experimentation, and above all dialogue, networking, interaction. Creating and supporting a fertile ground for innovation and dialogue does not necessarily require compromise. Honoring the influence of women in video art and cinema, our womenartconnect.com editorial board is proud to present a selection of powerful and surreal visions from seven uncompromising outsiders.

In these pages you will encounter details on a new wave of filmmakers marching away from the Hollywood stereotype, with films

by Cherilyn Williams; the like visionary cinema of Nina Djacic; the couragous documentarist Chrys Rochat; The Dancing Floor, an extraordinary film by Lyn Webster Wilde, and much more.

editorial womenartconnect.com

CinéWomen Board

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COVER Nina Djacic (realisateur) Love Me on the Low

LEFT Still from , Mengxi Rao TOP Still from Love Me on the Low, Nina Djacic

Edition curated

wac* VIDEO ART CINEMA THEATRE DANCE

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lyn webster wilde The Dancing Floor (UK, 2015)

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independent cinema

This is a film set in the winter landscape of the Black mountains of Wales, bleak, mysterious, numinous. It is a rite of passage drama, a love story, a riddle and metaphysical quest, suffused with music from some of the best traditional musicians in Wales, threading elements from the oldest myths with the newest insights from neuroscience.

It tells the story of psychologist, Sita, half Indian and half Welsh, who grew up here close to her uncle Mal, 'a kind of wizard', but has moved away, become ‘English’, and now lives in London, dogmatically committed to her research into the role of the brain ventricles, the ‘dragon in the brain’, in mental illness. Sita is struggling to deal with CATHY, an obstreperous young bi-polar patient, who is also a gifted traditional fiddler, when she is called back to Wales where uncle MAL has died. Mal was a quixotic poet who filled her childhood with weird and troubling experiences. She discovers that she has inherited his old manor house, on the condition that she ‘find what is lost’, a challenge with its roots in Celtic legend. Sita finds out from GETHIN (her uncle’s ‘apprentice’) that the tradition which her Mal carried is that of the ‘Children of Don’ (Irish: Tuatha de Danaan, Welsh: Plant Don), the tribe who, in the oldest tales were said to ‘bring magic to these islands’. In particular they brought the four ‘Hallows’ which are the Sword, the Spear, the Cauldron and the Stone. (These crop up everywhere in our mythology: think of the ‘stone of Scone’ which the monarch sits on to be crowned, think of Lleu

throwing his spear through the rock to kill his rival in the Mabinogion.

SITA is sceptical and reluctant to take on this task while GETHIN is both angry with her and jealous that Mal has left her the house, not him. Through the beautiful HEULWEN, she tastes the unsettling psychic side of the tradition, and then through Gethin, she sees the spiral ‘Dancing Floor’ and remembers an uncanny folk dance she performed with Gethin when they were children. She dances with Gethin, and begins to desire him though she finds out he is married. Bruised by these encounters Sita decides to go home, but that night, before she can leave, torrential rain floods Mal’s house, and she finds a black-handled knife in the cellar wall. This could be ‘what is lost’, a sign that she is the true inheritor. Her urban arrogance begins to fail, as she relives the experience of a night out in the winter mountains to ‘meet the ancestors’, an initiation arranged by Mal when she was a vulnerable nineteen year old. Reality slips out of joint as Sita’s frozen world melts and she feels the presence of the ancestors in the house. She is brought back from this terrifying otherworld by Cathy, her patient, who gets her to sing along with her violin. In the morning her resistance to Gethin has gone and they make love. For both of them it is an overwhelming experience.

Then…. the knife is stolen by Heulwen, who believes she is the rightful inheritor, but by now Sita has taken Mal’s bait and fights back. She returns to the place of her botched initiation twenty years before,

where she meets a small brown girl with a message which reconnects her to the visionary power she had as a child. She has a flash of insight into how the brain ventricles work which takes her beyond time and space – and will also take her research to another level. Working with an ill-assorted group of local people and children, she and Gethin turn their passionate feelings for each other into creative power as they piece together the fragments of the old ritual dance where the dancers turn into animals and gods and finally refine their moves to pierce the veil and allow those present to glimpse the mystery at the heart of the tradition: how something can come out of nothing . This extraordinary dance, not the old knife, is ‘what is lost’, the lifeblood of the old tradition. Now Sita understands where the ‘dragon in the brain’ goes when it flies. The dance has the power to bring back ‘what is lost’ to all who dance it or watch it – and to turn Sita from a dissociated neurotic into a woman of power.

Assembled with visionary editing and featuring outstanding performances, The Dancing Floor is an emotionally captivating film. Lyn Webster Wilde uses specific locations as inspiration for larger emotional inquires, leading

audiences into a kaleidoscope of dreams and memories. We are pleased to present Lyn Webster Wilde for this year's CinéWomen Edition. Lyn, tell us about your trajectory as a filmmaker.

What inspired you to express yourself in this medium?

I fell in love with cinema on holiday as a child: it was El Cid, where he tells them to prop him (dead) on his horse and send him out on the battlefield to inspire his men for the crucial fight. The emotional power of this blew me away and it’s always the emotional power of cinema which compels me. I guess that’s why I love a film like Malick’s Tree of Life so much, which explores a sense of spiritual connection with such intensity. But a bit later I fell for French cinema and used to bunk off school on a Friday afternoon to go to films by Jean Luc Godard or Alain Resnais. They were much cooler in mood, but very mysterious, and I loved them too. I think film conveys a sense of mystery more directly than words, which can so easily become analytic, and I wanted to explore mystery and then express what I found in film. So I started making

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films with an 8mm camera at school. The first one was about a first-former who is unhappy at school and escapes to have an adventure. I worked for years in TV making documentary films and doing studio direction. It’s only now, in later life, that I am fulfilling a long-nurtured dream, to make a feature film.

We want to take a closer look at the genesis of your film: how did you come up with the idea for The Dancing Floor?

It’s been a long time gestating! At university I had a teacher called Sita, an Indian woman who was very enigmatic and wise and she became a big influence on me.

She told me she had had to make a choice between the contemplative life of withdrawal and meditation and the active life of teaching in academia. In the end she chose to teach but there was a silence about her which fascinated me and which suggested great inner depth – and also struggle. I liked the idea of the struggle between wordly ambition and an unorthodox spiritual vocation. And that’s at the core of The Dancing Floor (the heroine is called Sita), that and the sense of a very

old and valuable tradition of knowledge hidden in the old myths, poetry and stories and kept alive by a small network of faithful people in Wales. I am talking about a native tradition which pre-dates Christianity and goes back to the people who migrated here after the Ice Age. I have spent many years researching this tradition. So in the film Sita travels from the modern world into an otherworld which is both terrifying and disorientating but which ultimately allows her to become her biggest self.

We have been deeply fascinated by your sensuous cinematography. Can you introduce our readers to your approach to lighting?

I must start by crediting my very experienced DP, Richard Greatrex, who is a Welshman who loves Wales and takes pains to communicate that love in the way he shoots scenes. Then there’s where I live: on the side of a hill overlooking a glittering pool and the mountains. It’s a very open place and the light changes all the time, reflecting off the pool which can be calm and mirror-like (as in the film) or ruffled like a miniature sea. The presence of the

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mountains means that the clouds are always morphing in the wide sky and the weather changes all the time too. In the summer, it can be paradisal, and in the winter bleak, windswept and dark! So we decided to shoot the film in early winter, to get the best chance of bleakness and half-light and the pervasive rain of Wales. The interiors are shot to match the light in the exteriors.

The idea is that Sita is pulled into this dramatic dark-light world when she arrives from over-lit London to Wales and is forced to remember what she experienced here as a child – which was actually a real illumination about the nature of reality, a kind of enlightenment! In an early shot we see her running up the hill as a little girl, with her own gigantic shadow leading her.

That shadow carries riches for her. We shot most of the exterior material at dawn or dusk, the ‘magic hour’ when the different worlds are close to each other and perceptions shift. Polarity is built into the film at many levels: male/female, light/dark, this world/otherworld and the idea is that

the gateway of the dancing floor comes into being when male and female, dark and light are in balance. Then the dance of creation can begin.

How did you conceive the character of Sita?

I think she came originally from a dream of a brown-skinned woman driving a bus up a steep slope in the winter ice and snow. She was so skilful, she knew how to operate the bus so that it could creep up the slippery incline. I was fascinated by her strength and skill and wrote about her in a story.

I think brown is a balance point between white and black and therefore has an alchemical quality. That’s the kind of strength which Sita wins in the film, but she starts from a wobbly place: scared to remember her childhood because it might threaten her present ambitions, scared to take on her dead uncle’s challenge (to ‘find what is lost’) because her world view and her mental balance might be threatened.

She’s like all of us, at that place where we

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have to take a risk to grow, we have to chuck out the old ways, but we don’t want to!

The logic of The Dancing Floor is the logic of a dream. Your cinema is marked by a stunning mix of realism and surrealism. How did you develop your filmmaking style?

I have been a meditator for a long time and I am very interested in perception and consciousness – and dreams. When I wrote Becoming the Enchanter (a book about my adventures while investigating an ancient Welsh myth) I discovered ways and means of expanding and dramatising moments of altered consciousness so that they could be experienced by my readers. With this film I had to find ways to do it visually, and I am still learning and experimenting with that because I don’t want to over-use special effects. I learned not to be ‘woolly’ and vague: Richard, the DP, used to ask me: ‘what’s really going on here? How do you see it?’ so I had to once again, push myself

to expand and explore these strange moments of shifted perception.

You use mythic subjects in a painterly way, where they are manipulated and personalized. Can you introduce our readers tot his peculiar aspect of your art practice?

Myth is very real and present for me. It’s not an academic thing. The barn owl cries in the film come from Blodeuwedd, the ‘woman of flowers,’ a figure who haunts the psyche of Wales, who is turned into an owl as punishment for killing her husband. The owl mask which appears in the film, is mine, made by myself and an artist friend when we were exploring shape-changing with a group of people interested in the old traditions. It is very interesting to lose your human form, even if just for a second or two. These elements all appear in the fourth story in the Mabinogion, a collection of ancient British tales, magical and strange, and suggestive of a civilisation which had a very sophisticated

understanding of how the world comes into being, how the ‘virgin bears a child’, ie how something comes out of nothing – one of the main themes of the film. The old Irish tales talk about the gods who appear in this story, the ‘Children of Don’, as the ‘race who brought magic to these islands’. I hope I am among their modern descendents!

You are building up to making to making a feature film of The Dancing Floor. Can you tell us something about this amazing project?

Well I am currently preparing a crowdfunding site, with a launch in September at a local castle! I am hoping to raise enough money to make a start, and then I hope to find bigger investors and maybe get money from our Welsh film agency. It will all be shot locally, with a mainly local crew and Welsh actors and wonderful Welsh traditional musicians. I have lived here for ten years and taught T’ai Chi and creative writing, so I know quite a lot of people, but I am hoping that communities elsewhere with an interest in myth, Celtic matters, native tradition, alchemy – or just the

beauty of our landscape – will also contribute. It’s great that it is so much cheaper now to make films, but to make a good film, which touches people and has real emotional power, that’s another thing.

That is not easy.

Your film features excellent performances. Did you rehearse a lot with the shots you prepared in advance?

My career was mainly in making documentaries so I haven’t worked much with actors. I really enjoyed it but I have a lot to learn still. I rehearsed as much as I could, but the schedule was pretty tight. I would have liked to rehearse a lot more, and with the feature film I am hoping to build in a proper rehearsal period with the actors. This will be especially necessary as the film ends with a special dance in which the ‘gate to the otherworld’ is opened. It has got to be right!

What do you hope viewers will take away from The Dancing Floor?

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I want them to feel enchanted – in a good way – ready to see the world differently and to know things are not always what they seem. With the longer film, yet to be made, I hope they will have more sense of what our native tradition is, that’s it’s not about ‘Wicker Man’ horror or creepiness, or like any of the other clichés which prevail.

Above all I want them to have a sense that beyond analysis and the everyday sufferings of life, there is a big, spacious, miraculous reality which can be reached and lived in.

What's your view on the future of women in cinema?

There are some great women film-makers out there – Joanna Hogg, Carol Morley, Andrea Arnold, Jane Campion are my current favourites – but there should and will be more. I am particularly keen to see women’s viewpoints expressed because our screens are still so dominated by testosterone-drenched movies designed for boys and young men! It is so interesting to see how the women mentioned above convey sexual experience, SO different to

men! I have just attended a lab for women directors run by Film Agency Wales, so maybe that’s a good sign that the balance will be re-dressed eventually, and one of the mentors is Desiree Akhavan, a young American-Iranian director/writer/performer whose film Appropriate Behaviour is making quite a stir. It’s a comedy film and the way she presents the heroine’s daft sexual meanderings is very clever and very female.

Thanks for your time and thought, Lyn. We wish you all the best with your filmmaker career. What's next for Lyn Webster Wilde? Have you a particular film in mind?

I do have a couple of ideas for screenplays: The New Age, a prequel to The Dancing Floor, about a young Welshman (Uncle Mal), recently de-mobbed, exploring the esoteric world of Soho in the fifties, and Saving the World, about two women in their sixties who disappear while on holiday, and are eventually tracked down in a very unlikely place.

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babi baracho Janaìna Colorful Like the Sky (Brazil, 2014)

independent cinema

Based on “A Um Passo”, a short story

by Rosa Amanda Strausz, Janaina Colorful Like the Sky is a psychologically penetrating, visually striking film. Babi Baracho raises important questions about the nature of personal identity, highlighting the potentiality of human kind as social being. With its sparse, poetic imagery, Janaina Colorful Like the Sky is an overwhelming emotional experience. We are pleased to present Babi Baracho for this year's CinéWomen Edition. Babi, tell us about your trajectory as a filmmaker.

What inspired you to express yourself in this medium?

I’ve Always wanted to study Arts and Communication. In 2010, when I was 19, I had decided to enter Journalism School, however in that same year I found out that there would be the first class of Cinema and Audiovisual School in my hometown, Natal. I changed my mind instantly and began the Cinema under graduation course that lasted for 4 years at Universidade Potiguar (UnP). In the beginning, I was a little lost, I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted. I was afraid I was going to regret studying something that

there was no market in my hometown. In a few words, I didn’t see a future. But then some professors gave the incentive that I needed and I ended up falling in love with cinema. What really inspired me was the fact that we are able to tell stories through the several languages that compose cinema. When I understood the whole cinema production process and all the knowledge that is necessary to acquire, I got fascinated and decided that I wanted to work with this, no matter what path in the cinema industry I would follow. At university I developed some short film projects. One of these projects is called “I Sing Love Songs and Carry Steel”, for which I have great affection especially because it was the first short film in which I dedicated myself in all functions and that I managed to leave my signature on the final product.

This short film was produced entirely by me and Johann Jean, cinematographer and editor, in both “I Sing Love Songs and Carry Steel” and “Janaina Colorful Like the Sky” and surely of other films to come. But I consider the latter my first professional work as a director.

We want to take a closer look at the

genesis of your film: how did you come up with the idea for Janaina Colorful Like the Sky? When I was in my last year of Cinema School I needed to do a final project.

My main research was on screenplay adaptation. Thus, I needed to exercise adaptation, so I searched short stories with themes that interested me such as women and female protagonism as well as poetics. Throughout my search I came across the short story named “A Um Passo” (“One Step Away”) from the Brazilian author Rosa Amanda Strausz. I fell in love with the protagonist because I found her very brave, self-confident and visceral. At this moment I knew she was perfect to represent female protagonism in cinema. So I reached the author to ask permission to use the short story in my

adaptation project. With her approval, I started the screenwriting process.

Months later the screenplay was awarded in a City Hall competition to cover the costs of the production. Then, the screenplay was revised by Brazilian screenwriter, Marcelo Caetano and after that André Santos, Johann Jean and I worked in different version of the screenplay.

In your film drama is stripped down to its essential elements: we have deeply appreciated your radical take on narrative, can you tell us ow did you develop the script and the structure of Janaina Colorful Like the Sky? As I said before, the screenplay is an adaptation of the short story “A Um

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Passo”, from Rosa Amanda Strausz. The adaptation is a transcription of the language. While the literary author possesses the verbal language and its metaphorical wealth, the filmmaker possesses several expressions such as image, sound, verbal language, illumination, frames, color among others.

Thus, I believe that an adaptation is a recreation process; it is a work that also requires creativity. The screenplay of “Janaina Colorful Like The Sky” was built with the specific base points of the short story, focusing on the conduction that we wanted to give to the character through her point of view. We wanted to show a little more of this woman’s intimacy.

With that idea in mind, we structured the narrative in a way that the cinematographic elements helped telling the story

that we wanted. Another important point was to create a screenplay that seemed real, that could be filmed in our town and with the conditions that we had, that were completely different from the short story. This work was done with a lot of research before finalizing the last version of the screenplay.

We have found stimulating your use of sapient use of symbols reminding us of Victor Erice's cinema: can you tell us something about this aspect of Janaina Colorful Like the Sky? I really like identifying symbols that express ideas as a form of representation of some reality. I believe that the use of symbols has a great importance of communication and being able to use that in cinema is something that I

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consider incredible, as well as the use of metaphors. Using these elements in cinematographic language enriches the narrative considerably and in “Janaína Colorful Like the Sky” these symbols help construct the narrative with poetics and sensibility. One of my favorite moments is when the protagonist compares her body to a bull’s body. She says that she likes the idea that every part of the bull’s body has a name, even though the bull itself does not know hot to say its own name, just like her. “My body also has a name, a lot of names”.

She paints her body giving it names in an attempt to recognize herself and feel safe.

From a visual point of view, the use of plongée angles in movement is a peculiar element of your cinematographic language in Janaina Colorful Like the Sky. Can

you comment this expressive choice?

“Plongée” is a French term that means diving. I use that resource to enter the protagonist’s life and be part of her world. In the very first scenes of “Janaína Colorful Like the Sky” we see details of the protagonist’s body followed by a plongeé in movement that introduces the character showing her entire body and the place where she is, capturing the entire dimension. Plongée gives us the feeling of inferiority, for the character finds herself in a big and empty place.

This feeling of inferiority can also be seen as the character’s fragility, as she is lying naked in a restroom. The framing movement is used for esthetics reasons but also so that the spectator finds out little by little the place where she is.

We also use “contre-plongée” in the moment the character opens her bag and

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finds a marker. It represents a meaning of superiority to the character, which from that moment starts showing her strength. This element that appeared to her, a marker, will have a great importance on the path she will follow throughout the film, even though she doesn’t know where it came from.

she is doing. There is something that makes her strong and we realize that when we see her writing on the wall the sentence that was kept in her memory.

The plongée in movement in the scene where the protagonist sleeps on the boat is repeated the same way as in the beginning of the film. Once more, the character wakes up without knowing who she is, how she got there and where she came from. She is fragile once again as her memory loss weakens her.

However, right after that we see the last plongée when the character approaches the overpass. Unlike the other ones, this plongée is used to locate the character but this time she isn’t as fragile and inferior as before, for she knows what

I searched for actresses that fully accepted their body in order to live the film’s protagonist because only with this feature she could give life to a character who feels so safe. Carol Piñeiro is a theater actress and performer. In her works it is noticeable her body’s acceptance and feminine courage. It wasn’t difficult for her to find the character that we were looking for and in each rehearsal her strength grew.

Dudu Galvão was essential so that the protagonist had trust in herself and to build Angelo, Dudu’s character. They

Carol Piñeiro and Dudu Galvão did an excellent job in this film, how did you work with her?

tuned in an incredible way since the first rehearsal, which was when we knew we had made the right choice. The cast coaching work was conducted by Márcia Lohss, whose technique consists of working the body, breathing and the actor’s memory so that they can find the characters. After that, we rehearsed each scene and we talked about the tone in each action and line. Directing actors who commit themselves completely to the project and end up falling in love with it, just like you, is very easy and fulfilling. Working with Carol was a fantastic experience because in some moments I even forgot the director’s role and saw myself as a small woman learning about courage, strength and trust.

Did you rehearse a lot with the shots you prepared in advance?

The actors collaborated building the characters during rehearsals along with us. This permitted that their actions and dialogues became more natural and also the rehearsals flowed in a better way.

Some scenes needed more rehearsing during pre-production. But before everything, we wanted to work with Carol’s nudity so that she would feel safe walking among others naked.

We needed her to get used to that because we would film in the city and most scenes she would have no clothes on. The fight scene needed to be choreographed so that the actors knew the right time to hit without hurting Dudu so much (even though he was a little injured in the end). Another scene that was rehearsed a lot was the one in the overpass. The actors needed to bring feeling to the dialogue, some kind of poetry to the lines, as well as the scene

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in which Angelo introduces himself and talks about his life story. Although we rehearsed enough and thought that we had found the right tone for each scene, it didn’t mean that the moment we’re shooting is going to come out the same.

There are always unforeseen things that happen in set. Some scenes were repeated more times due to external interferences, such as people on the street who wanted to see what was going on, car noise that would interfere in the audio, cloudy sky that would change the illumination that we wanted for the scene etc.

We have previously mentioned Victor Erice, can you tell us who among international directors influenced your work?

As a reference for the screenplay I searched directors that work with

narratives that are a bit surreal such as Michael Gondry and Luis Buñuel and also Woody Allen among others. For the cinematography, Johann Jean and I were influenced by Walter Carvalho, a Brazilian cinematographer who worked in several feature films in Brazil, such as “Febre do Rato”, directed by Claudio Assis, “Lavoura Arcaica”, directed by Luís Fernando Carvalho and “Os Famosos e os Duendes da Morte”, directed by Esmir Filho. In all of these, the cinematography dialogues with the narrative, it also tells the story of the film, basically, it makes sense. I think this is one of the great searches in cinema.

What do you hope viewers will take away from the film?

I hope the spectators let the narrative take them, I hope they go on this

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experience with no prejudice and end up being enchanted with the protagonist’s personality, with her strength and courage. I also hope that after seeing the film, people start appreciating simple moments of our daily lives, without judging each other so much.

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?

I think women have gained more space in the cinema industry and they have shown that being behind the camera is not a job for men only. Women have the perseverance cinema needs and also the care with details. It is necessary that we show this strength so that the cinema that reaches a great part of the

audience is not only commercial cinema and also in order to fight prejudice against women who have important roles in any kind of business.

It is necessary to resist, to invade, fight and show efficiency and knowledge.

The cinema festivals for female filmmakers make a kind of mapping and have an idea of the number of films that are done by women every year, this helps the fight for acknowledgment. For instance, “Janaína Colorful Like the Sky” was exhibited in “Festival de Cine de la Mujer Marialionza” in Venezuela. It is a festival with political character that integrates in its programming space for discussion on women in cinema.

I’m sure that we are walking a path that will lead on to an equal cinematographic market, one that will not accept any kind of discrimination against female directors. Women have

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still a lot of work to show.

Thanks for your time and thought, Babi. We wish you all the best with your career. What's next for Babi Baracho? Have you a particular film in mind?

Where I live there isn’t much public financial incentive for cinema productions, at least when we compare to the main capitals in Brazil. The local audiovisual class fights for recognition and for more incentives. Nowadays I still study Cinema, I’m about to finish a postgraduation course, and I am a member of Coletivo Caboré Audiovisual. We’re currently working on projects to get government help to finance our movies.

Among the projects, there are short films, two feature films and a television series.

One of the short film screenplays was written by me and also André Santos, who co-wrote “Janaína Colorful Like the Sky” with me. The movie is called “Sem

Retrato e Sem Bilhete” (“No Picture and No Ticket”) and it’s about a man who seems to live in the past, as he took some habits after his father and likes to live in a manner that does not suit Natal’s society, which is the place where the story is set. The screenplay focuses on a romance that was inspired in Noel Rosa’s songs, a great Brazilian samba musician.

Thus, the film intends to honor the history of samba through the protagonist’s behavior and the soundtrack, but with a poetic touch in the narrative and also with a cinematography that uses the same elements of “Janaína Colorful Like the Sky”, only a little more audacious.

I thank the opportunity to talk about “Janaína Colorful Like the Sky”. It is very gratifying for the whole crew to have this international acknowledgement. This is very important for us who try to make cinema in the northeast of Brazil, still with little resources. Thank you, CinéWomen.

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paromita dhar In Between (Spain, 2015)

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independent cinema

In her penetrating film "In between" the talented Paromita Dhar gets to the core of contemporary immigrant experience, imparting unparalleled psychological intensity to the documentary genre. Paromita's sensivity and grit are what made her film unique compared to other documentaries dealing with the immigrant experience. In the director's statement she said "What attracts me is the more fundamentally tragic question at the heart of their existence and since the beginning we made a conscious decision of not portraying them as victims but rather reflecting more on the humane part."

We have been deeply impressed by these words. In between takes as its subject the immigrant experience in Madrid and expands to something richly philosophical. We are pleased to present Paromita Dhar for this year's CinéWomen Edition.

Paromita, tell us about your trajectory as a filmmaker. What inspired you to express yourself in this medium?

My journey started long back, when I had just started collage. Back then, It was not cinema that particularly interested me but theatre’s narrative ability to bring people together. That was my beginning. When I had just joined collage we started our own theatre group called Masrah. This theatre group got me into the thick of storytelling.

We used to write all our own scripts and eventually, that’s what led to my fascina-

tion with cinema. As an undergraduate I studied Communication and Media and split the rest of my time doing theatre and understanding films. I had spent a brief time in advertising and did a couple internships in ad agencies. As an intern, I quickly learnt that this medium of communication wasn’t where my heart was; I found the hyper-focus on selling and consumerism overwhelming.

It was the last year of college when we studied documentaries and I had a chance to watch and dissect the ideas and thoughts that went into them. I knew this was the form I wanted to experiment with.

The compelling aspect of mixing truth, ideas, and the possibility of integrating cinematic visual fiction sharply called out to me.

Theatre was exciting because it was live, but then I started playing around with the camera- it was a cinematic dance I couldn’t get enough of. Following my heart I went on to do my masters in media arts and production in Australia, then went to Sydney Film School where I did a one-year intense course in filmmaking, which was vital to my understanding and comfort with the technicalities of making film. That’s where I got to play around with different cameras, 16mm, bolex and 35 mm cameras.

Initially I tried to work with editing but then eventually I realized that I like to be in the field, not in front of the computer.

I made couple of films as a student over

there and returned to my city in Bangalore.

Once I was back I started working on a film project called “Behind the tin sheets” with a couple of other friends. This project was about migrants from across India who had moved to Bangalore; a rapidly growing and a developing city to build the metro system.

The film told their stories, their fantasies and their ideas about love. I shot the film and collaborated with two friends who also co-directed. That’s when my journey with migration and immigration started.

We want to take a closer look at the genesis of In between: what attracted you to this project?

Actually it’s a very personal journey, how it began and the process itself. I moved from India to Spain at the end of 2012. I didn’t know Spanish when I moved to Madrid. It was interesting because I hadn’t expected such a vast Bangladeshi population in the city. I was always kind of curious about this

community- my dad originally is from Bangladesh but had moved to India many years ago. Ironically, my only interaction with Bangladeshis has always been outside India despite the fact that India is so close to Bangladesh, and once were the same country pre-independence.

Even when I was in Australia I had a parttime job and many of my co-workers were Bangladeshis, that was the beginning of my interaction where we really got close because I speak Bengali, and culturally share a lot of things in common. This is why when I moved to Madrid it was similar, I just suddenly saw so many people from Bangladesh and it excited me. I could say that most Bangladeshis who don’t have papers and end up in Spain sell beers and soft drinks at night because Spain has a huge culture of occupying public spaces and drinking in the plazas and in the streets. It was one such night that I was with 15 other Spanish friends but was struggling with the lan-

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guage because the Spaniards didn’t know much of English and I didn’t know much of Spanish. We were in the streets drinking and then suddenly this Bangladeshi guy just came over and sold me a beer. I started to talk to him in Bengali and he was absolutely surprised that I knew Bengali! We then started a conversation, and I literally spent the rest of the night talking with this man outside in the streets of Madrid in the peak of winter. He told me his entire life story, how he had come to Spain and his point of view of immigrant life. He was in debt because of the middleman; he really wanted to get back to his country because his life was way better back in Bangladesh.

He told me one specific thing: “I like to smoke cigarettes and I could afford cigarettes in my country but here I can’t even afford a pack of cigarettes. I had a better life there”.

The next morning when I woke up I just couldn’t forget all the stories he told me. I

had always been interested in immigrant narratives because I myself have been a migrant all my life; I never lived in a city where I spoke the same language or my maternal language, because there are so many different languages in India. So the next morning I woke up and decided to start researching. The research started at the end of 2012 and it went on until the middle of 2015.

As I went into research I met a lot more people from one particular neighbourhood in Madrid, which is full of Bangladeshis. I started to interact with all the workers, all the people who owned shops and that’s where this film really started. The deeper I got into research, the more the film started to come together. I knew I wanted to tell this story.

Was it important for you to make a personal film?

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Yes, off course. I mean, if the subject matter is not personal and I cant connect to what I am talking about; I don’t think I could make an honest film. I remember my documentary professor in film school used to say: “you need to tell personal stories” she also used to say “ if you can, you need to first point the camera at yourself and then point the camera at others.” I am still far away from doing that.

Like I said in my last question, this film is very personal because I think I had a universal connection with Bangladeshis at some level and it was always there, the curiosity always existed. Once I moved to Madrid I think I had the tools and the vision, so I just took that jump.

Viktor Kossakovsky, a Russian filmmaker, had once said in his master class “the universe conspires for you to make the film” for a while I was only doing camera work for other filmmakers. I was often asked,

“Are you ever going to direct a film?” I used to tell them “I am not going to go looking for a story, I think the story will come to me some day” and that’s exactly what happened with In Between I just moved to Madrid and in the first one month the story was there in the streets over a beer. I do believe that the universe was conspiring for me to make this film. From day one it was a very personal film because of my background, my family’s background and my connection with narratives. Additionally the fact that the Bangladeshis and I both were immigrants in Spain connected and bonded us.

We have been deeply impressed with the structure of the film. Did the story unfold before the camera, or were you already aware of these various pieces of the puzzle?

It was a long researched film and by the

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time I had started shooting all of my characters, they were already my friends. This led to a more personal and close process of making In Between- it wasn’t clinical or a simply observational documentary style.

Like I said before what really attracts me to film, is not pure documentary style, I am heavily influenced by fiction and the possibility to merge them in documentaries. I think blurring the lines between of fantasy, reality, experience and possibility is powerful. I had worked with the community for a year or so, over that time I had already done each interview 2 to 3 times, so I knew rd their stories and by the 3 time I was interviewing them I knew exactly which part of their story I wanted them to narrate and how. I workshopped the stories with them and made them work on it as storytellers.

Off course a lot of magic just unfolded when the camera was around. Other stories were workshopped and executed more visually and stylistically.

In between features a stunning editing work. What were some of your aesthetic decisions?

My editor was my close friend who works as an editor in Paris. She had collaborated with me at many levels while making this film. Her investment in the film went beyond just editing because we were a very small and independent crew and did not have any kind of funding. We also had a great connection because we had worked together in film school.

Every time that I finished a big chunk of shooting I would send it across to the editor and she would immediately start working with the rushes to get familiar with its ambience. This resulted in her being actively aware of the process and went a long way in benefitting the structure of the film.

Aesthetically I was always aware that I wanted a slow paced film, mirroring the

emotions of the stories being told.

The stillness in the film was pre-decided based on the stories that were narrated, which dealt a lot with the loneliness after migrating to the big cities. A lot of the aesthetic decisions were already made while shooting the film and while editing we followed a similar pace of the shots.

Realizing a very personal film is always an impressive feat. What challenges did you face while making In between?

There were quite a few challenges. One of the biggest challenges was trying to get a female perspective on the whole story. I was quite sure I needed women because there is a huge difference in the stories of a Bangladeshi male and a female perspective. The reasons why a woman migrates from Bangladesh a majority of the time is because she gets married. Trying to find women who were okay being in front of the camera was a big challenge because most

of the time their husbands would not give permission. It almost took me a year to find a woman who could make that choice by herself and not based on her husband’s decision. Finally I managed to work with two very strong women. My hunch is that it worked out because I am a woman myself and found it easier to connect and bring out their stories.

The other challenge that I faced was trying to find a beer seller willing to go on camera. The reason for this difficulty is due to their religion, they are bound by Islam’s protocol to shun alcohol, but once they arrive in Madrid that’s the only job available for a person with no legal papers. None of their families back home were aware of the fact that they had to sell beers on the streets to survive their initial days. I kept trying to find someone who would agree to work with me on this project and finally Somon the beer seller who appears in the film In between, agreed to do it.

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Your cinematography reminds us of Herzog's films. How did you conceive the visual style of your film?

Wow! Thanks, I am flattered because I am a big fan of Herzog. In my work I always attempt to work strongly on the visual style and make the film a cinematic experience.

Just because it’s a documentary doesn’t mean you can’t have pre-planned shots or an extremely visually potent experience. I was very sure about the visual style in the research period itself, Right as I figured the core feeling of emptiness and loneliness, which comes with migration, I became sure about the stillness of the camera work in the film. Framing was extremely important as the shots were still, I usually took some time to decide my frames before rolling.

The locations in Madrid were always played out like characters. I am always interested in working with the location and bringing it to life. I think something consistent about my work is the pursuit to give emotions to

inanimate beings, places, and things.

In between is an emotionally penetrating journey to the core of the immigrant experience. What do you want people to remember after seeing your film?

One of the main attempts while making this film was to move away from the image of an immigrant as a victim and make them more humane. I just want people to remember that the next time they are in a restaurant and a guy comes in to sell them flowers or some trinkets, they remember that these are people as human as us, they have the same dreams, the same wishes and expectations from life. I want to bridge the gap that keeps locals and immigrants as two separate entities. They are poets, philosophers, entrepreneurs, teachers, and singers just like you and me. And they have the same aspirations. We tend to look at immigrants unilaterally and I strongly be-

lieve it’s not the only image we should be left with.

We have previously mentioned Herzog's films, yet your filmmaking style is far from what is generally considered academic. Who among international artists influenced your work?

Herzog is a huge influence and I just love that man and I love his films but obviously I am far away from his style of filmmaking. I love Herzog for his madness and the lengths he goes to while making his films, It’s very inspiring. One of the biggest influences for filmmaking style would be Jia Zhangke, his film 24 city was my main reference stylistically while making in between. Also among documentary filmmakers I have to mention the influence of Viktor Kossakovsky. Because you mentioned my filmmaking style being far away from the academic it reminds me of what Viktor Kossakovsky said in his master class he said “ if you want to be an academic and

give out facts then write a paper don’t make a film” this really stuck in my head.

Film and documentary is a visual medium and should be a cinematic experience. To that effect, Christopher Doyle has also been an influence as a cinematographer.

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 and animation?

For more than half a century women have been discouraged from getting behind the camera, this holds true to a lot of other professions that are widely considered ‘a man’s job’. That said there have been considerable movement and progress with more and more women getting involved with film. I think there is a brilliant future.

In my own experience, I had felt no dis-

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crimination at all; in fact there are people that call me because I am a woman cinematographer. In a country like India there are lots of spaces that you can´t enter if the stories involve women. Lots of people are looking for a women crew to increase accessibility. Since the digital age a lot more films and a lot more access to tools have opened up. The future is interesting and positive.

Thanks for your time and thought, Paromita. We wish you all the best with your career. What's next for Paromita Dhar? Have you a particular film in mind?

I just moved back to India, I´m already based in Bangalore.

And… Yes! There are a lot of exiting projects in mind. One of them is connected to In between. At some point I want to make a feature length film based on In Between. The grant and funding I got only allowed me to create a short film. I do have

a lot more rushes, a lot more stories of different people that are not featured in this film.

When I start on this, I would like to visit Bangladesh to capture the perspective of the people who get left behind: the mothers, the lovers, the fathers, and the kids.

They are in an eternal state of waiting. Ideally, I want to move to Bangladesh for some time to research and continue this process, but at the moment I need funding to go ahead.

The other project I have in mind is actually a fiction film that’s at the idea stage as of now. The idea revolves around two migrant construction workers in India who are trying to travel to the moon. I am hoping that some day I can make this film because I really want to create an extremely surreal fiction film soon. My head is full of stories I want to tell, they occupy a lot of my headspace and keep me motivated and hopeful for the future.

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chrys rochat per(Brazil-Argentina, 2015) 6Titolo Daysche in inizia Chubut

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independent cinema

With grit and sensivity, Chrys Rochat creates a subversive mix of dramatic and documentary techniques: is an adventurous work of cinema, and an emotionally penetrating journey. We are pleased to present Chrys Rochat for this year's CinéWomen Edition. Chrys, tell us about your trajectory as a filmmaker and cinematographer. What inspired you to express yourself in this medium?

I started out in the business as an actress in Los Angeles, where I lived on and off for 8 years, but writing has been a very important part of my development as an artist. I like to express ideas in my own way, in addition, I’m a leo, therefore, I like to boss people around, with all that I had to be a director! (LOL) Then I studied scriptwriting, direction, and editing in Los Angeles, and afterwards, photography for cinema in the Dominican Republic where I also lived for 1 year.

In 2012, you launched your production company Sin Fronteras Filmes in Rio. Can you introduce our readers to this amazing experience?

I’m a nomad. Since I was 18, I’ve been living between the US, Europe, Latin America and I travelled to as many as 23

countries, not as a tourist, but really spending time, and trying to get to know those cultures. I spent an entire month travelling all over in Morocco, and I even went to Iceland. I mean, who goes to Iceland? Just kidding, It’s a fantastic place. So, when I returned to Brazil in 2012, I felt I needed to settle down a little in order to do bigger things, and that’s why I decided to open my own production company to focus on making cinema here.

I chose that name “Sin Fronteras”, because I’ll always be “No Borders”, and I want to make films for the world.

How did you come up with the idea for 6 Days in Chubut?

Well, that’s a funny story. One afternoon in August, Didier skypes me from Geneva, Switzerland, saying he’s at the airport, and that he was coming down to Patagonia in Argentina, to film the whales for a documentary his friend Thomas Fuss was doing, and if I wanted to see the whales, that was my chance. So, the next morning I hopped on a plane, and I went to meet the guys in Buenos Aires, so we could head on to Patagonia for our expedition. It’s always been my dream to go to Patagônia, and that was only 3 days before my birthday. Actually, this was right before the world cup, and I was supposed to go on a shooting with a

german crew to Paraguay, to interview the paraguaian soccer team the next day, and it was such a no brainer for me, I simply blew off the german job, and I headed to Patagonia for a much more thrilling ride. After all, when you have to decide between the paraguaian soccer team, and the patagonian whales for your birthday, what else can you choose?

Can you talk about your creative relationship with Didier Noirot and how it has evolved through your work together?

Didier is a spectacular professional. He’s such a talented diver and underwater cinematographer, he won an Emmy for his work, and I was very impressed by the way he was able to film the wildlife underwater. I do a lot of work for the Discovery Channel, translating, subtitling, dubbing, and directing voice overs, I have like more than a thousand

films and series I worked on for the Brazilian market. Didier was the star of one of the series I translated for the Animal Planet, so we got to know each other, and we decided we were going to develop a project to do in Brazil about the wildlife in the sea and rivers throughout the country. He’s so focused, and so courageous. I’m so lucky to have had the opportunity to see his work up close, and also to get to know Thom, and see the beautiful work he was doing. It was so funny to be the only girl in an all male crew, in the beginning, they all thought I’d be whining and complaining, but I surprised them all! Hahaha Subtle humor and expressive cinematography make 6 Days in Chubut a transporting experience.

How did you develop your filmmaking style?

Look, I’m Brazilian, you can’t take humor, and wit out of us. I have to say

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that the 6 Days in Chubut experience was the most natural, spontaneous, and profound I've ever had in filmmaking, simply because, nothing was planned.

Nothing could be planned, because nature is something that just happens.

You can’t cue when the whale is going to show up, you can’t control the weather, or the movement of the boat, so it was absolutely a surprise every minute. I fell in love with the whales, all the surprise you see in the screen is authentic, it’s alive. It’s very humbling to see nature in it’s full power, and to acknowledge that you are just a human before things that are much greater than you, and also to see that with all their size they can be so kind and thoughtful of you. They feel you, they look in your eyes, they understand you are a human, and that they are huge whales, and they have to be gentle with you, because you are fragile in relation to them, and this is simply amazing. And as a filmmaker, I just tried to capture bits and pieces of what I lived and felt being

there, and that’s why this film is an eyewitness documentary of the expedition. It couldn’t be any other way.

From the first time we watched your documentary we thought of Werner Herzog's cinema. Can you say your biggest influences in cinema?

Oh my god! It’s huge an honor to be compared to a such an important director as Herzog, I have no idea what I did to deserve it. Well, I do admire many director’s such as Herzog, himself, Wim Wenders, Costa Gavras, Ken Loach, also, younger guys, like Thomas Vinterberg, whose “The Celebration” was very important to me when I did my first film in Los Angeles and I saw the opportunity to use the digital to convey a strong idea.

But I’m very influenced by the French cinema, because my greatest master was my own husband who was Eric Rochat, who was a French director that made many films, including “The 5th Monkey”

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with Ben Kingsley, and the “Story of O” trilogy. Since I lived in France for 6 years, and had the opportunity to see the works of Truffaut, Godard and other French directors, and I love the intimate atmosphere, the depth of the stories, and the subtleties of the French humor. I wouldn’t be able to enumerate all the films and directors I like, but since my main film school was Los Angeles, I couldn’t not mention Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and David Lynch, that I’m very much into. I’m still looking for my own game, but I have great guys to look up to.

What was the most challenging thing about making this film?

I guess the cold was the most challenging thing for me. To go from 95°F in Rio de Janeiro to a 35°F polar wind in Patagonia was pretty tough. There was a moment when I thought to myself: “What the heck am I doing here? I can’t bear the wind outside for 2 minutes, how am I supposed to go on a boat in the open sea for 6

hours?” I guess it all pay off in the end, because today the film has been in two festivals in Brazil, Festival Internacional de Televisão, and X FATU in 2014, and now in September 2015, it’s going to Handle Climate Film Festival in Shenzhen, China, and Voices From the Water in Bangalore, India.

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?

I think women have been discouraged from many things in the past, and still are today, but that doesn’t stop us from doing what we really want. I don’t think like a woman, I think like a human being.

I don’t believe intellect, talent or determination are dictated by gender. So, basically, I think we can do whatever we set our mind to. In this film in particular,

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during the production, I was surrounded by men, and it went great, and when I got back from the expedition, and I started the post production phase, I only had women around me, such as my executive producer, and associate in this project, Vanessa Fontana, who embraced the idea, believed in me, and made the conclusion of this film possible, and also Aglay Bond, my lawyer, and Andrea Richa, my best friend, whose feedback, and support was very much appreciated when I was editing. They all had to listen to me depicting in details for hours how I fell in love with a southern right whale. That’s how women make movies.

Thanks for your time and thought, Chrys Rochat. We wish you all the best with your career. What's next for you? Have you a particular project in mind?

Yes, I have a very exciting film now

that I’m producing, and I will direct next year. It’s an original script that I wrote: “Notorious mystery writer, haunted by a creative block, believes she witnessed a murder, and now she wants to solve it. But her investigation has certain implications, exposing her to real danger when falling in the intricate animal trafficking underworld in Amazonia. Pressured by her editor, to write a new book, she uses the death of an Indian girl as the central point of her plot. However, that will bring her to a dilemma: Has the murder really happened or is it only her imagination seeking obsessively for a new idea? Soon, what she saw and what she writes intertwine, and even she is unable to distinguish between reality and fiction.” I have a very important cast in Brazil such as Camila Morgado (Olga), as the writer, Eunice Baía (Tainá), as the indian young woman, André Ramiro (Elite Squad), as the investigator, among others, and the distribution by Europa Filmes.

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nina djacic Director and Cinematographer, lives and works in Canada

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independent cinema

“When I first head LOVE ME ON THE LOW, I instantly saw flashes of images; I knew I had to create a visual story for this. The video explores a presence that haunts both the home and mind of this beautiful woman. The video explores a presence that is haunting both the home and mind of this beautiful woman. This presence is an old flame that has long burned out but yet still holds a trance over her. We shot the video on my Canon 7D, and I rigged together a few things to create a makeshift stabilizer that would allow me to flow through the space.

This was a technical decision made in order to maximize the effects of the narrative - in order to physically mimic how feelings just glide through us. Our additional equipment was luckily attained from our film school. Without the Toronto Film School this vision would have just lived in my head and eventually burned out. LOVE ME ON THE LOW exemplifies how love can enchant and haunt even the most powerful and cold people. This room she steps into is a state of mind that keeps replaying and reliving her old love.

This is definitely something that everyone has or will relate to at some point in life.”

From the first time we watched Nina Djacic's music video Love me on the low we were deeply fascinated by the balance she has been capable of achieving in this work between classical sensibility and pure experimentation. We are glad to present Nina Djacic for this year's CinéWomen Edition. Nina, tell us about your trajectory as a filmmaker.

What inspired you to express yourself in this medium?

Film is everything to me. As a child I first wanted to be a vet, then I was convinced I

would play for the WNBA, and when I actually grew up I pursued criminology and law. I was very indecisive always about everything, but the one constant that I’ve had in my life was always film. I realized that criminology and Law were different on television, and that the cinematic were the part I fell in love with. In my second year of University, I took an introduction course to Film Studies and shortly after switched my major. This is the smartest thing I’ve ever done. Film is the only medium that mimics life so realistically, and it’s the only medium that contorts all of the arts into one. You have more tools and flexibility to create a story and meaning.

Paintings are beautiful but you can’t make the subject’s talk or music play out of those images. And in theatre you can change the backdrops but that’s all it is – a changing backdrop, not a real location.

Every other art is an acquired taste, except for cinema. People will always be invested in movies and television shows.

The closest thing to life is cinema.

Many of the classic cinematographic concerns, like continuity in time and space, are very important to you.

What’s your writing process like?

For someone who focuses on continuity, my writing process is very messy. It’s basically pages and pages of point form notes that reflect what I see in my head.

Then I have to piece these notes, kind of like a puzzle, in a way that will best show the image that I see. During this stage, I really focus on what makes the most sense in terms of narrative and how I can best tell the story. I also write from a cinematographer’s perspective, with editing at the back of head. I think and

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write from a visual place, with cinematography and editing heavily in mind. If I foresee a problem, I work to solve or change it in the writing process rather than in production or post. My writing process is just as much problem solving as it is story creating and telling.

for the video, I just played the song on loop every night before bed. I would visualize different plots to the song and jot down my most cinematic and favorite bits until a story kind of just formed it self.

How long was the project?

We want to take a closer look at the genesis of your film: how did you come up with the idea for this work?

When I first heard the song “Love me not he low,” I instantly knew what I wanted to visually say. I described it to my producer, and she informed me about this Swedish proverb: “old love never rusts. We wanted to show that people don’t really ever fall out of love, but that they just find a better love or choose to forget about that particular love. But what happens if you don’t want to forget? That’s exactly what we strived to exemplify. But what happens if you don’t want to forget it? That’s what we wanted to show. So I kept the Swedish proverb closely to me during the preproduction stages. Once I had my thesis

My team and I worked on the project for a little over two months. We had three shooting days spread over a two-week period and a lot of post-production to do.

What was the most challenging thing about making this film?

The most challenging aspects of creating this video all took place in production. We didn’t have the right equipment to create my vision. We were supposed to get our hands on a Glidecam, but that fell through shortly into the production. So I either had to abandon my idea or my shooting style.

Luckily, I was too stubborn to do any of that so I rigged together a makeshift tool: a shoulder mount and monopod. I

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took a lot of takes and just wished for the best from there.

We would like 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 for decades, however in the last decaded there are signs that something is changing. What is your view on the future of women filmmakers?

As long as we keep talking about this difference, there will be a difference. I think that the first step to balancing it out is to just overcome it and work. Do your best to create beautiful shots; shots that you are proud of and shots that inspire you to create more. If someone discourages you, whether a man or woman, let that fuel you to create a better shot. But to answer your question, the future is already looking better for women because more of us are becoming interested in cinematography. Essentially, the more attention we draw to women being

discouraged to get behind a camera, the more of a problem it becomes. Women are more productive in this industry once they label themselves a filmmaker. We prosper when gender roles are eliminated and when we just focus on the production of film.

Thanks for sharing your time, Nina, we wish you all the best with your filmmaker career. What's next for Nina Djacic? Have you a particular film in mind?

Thank-you! Just to create and learn, and begin my career. I have a few shorts coming up over the fall and winter. But what’s really next is to slowly introduce myself to the world as a director of photography and to create things that visually inspire myself, in hope of insuring someone else along the way. I want to create a movie that means something to someone else.

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I think and write from a visual place, with cinematography and editing heavily in mind

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mengxi rao White Mushroom, Black Earth (USA, 2015)e

independent cinema

Mengxi Rao is a young Chinese film student who is currently interested in pushing edges visual storytelling. She calls herself an artist-to-be, for she is still in the middle of defining her field of artistic expression; also because of the fact that she frequently makes ‘to-be’ art that only become complete when viewers choose to believe and engage. The completed pieces are unique to each individual. As a life long writer, she has been trying to transplant the playfulness of literature and the sophistication of words into her filmmaking, creating visual arts that could be read as rich semiotic systems of symbols and significations, and those who choose to explore and navigate through them can eventually see beyond the plain texts and find their own answers.

Mengxi values the cooperation between the viewers and her, in which each participant creates his or her own art. Mengxi now lives and works in Philadelphia. She is an MFA candidate at Temple University From the first time we watched White Mushroom, Black Earth we were deeply impressed by Mengxi Rao's audacious storytelling. The story is simple, yet the implications of its characters’ actions are profound. With its subversive mix of dramatic and documentary techniques, White Mushroom, Black Earth is a provocative meditation on time and civilization. We are honored to present Mengxi Rao for this year's CinéWomen Edition. Mengxi, tell us about your trajectory as a filmmaker. What inspired you to express yourself in this medium?

Rather than a filmmaker I would say I am more of a visual-storyteller. I have always considered myself a writer — I still am — and filmmaking to me is almost just a shift of the medium where the story is being told. Indeed it changes the way one tells the story dramatically, yet to me

the basic principle stays the same: to tell a story, with unusual language. I am fascinated by the structure and rules of a language system itself.

People use language to communicate with each other, and a language is a system of shared meanings represented by symbols. Each word signifies a collection of meanings in our head, and we are always looking for the right word to symbolize the abstract, organic thoughts generated by our mind. Plain text bores me; I find myself always attracted to metaphor, allegory and other image-oriented ways of expression. When placed in the right position, raw, unprocessed direct images in language could be very provocative. From 2012 to 2013 I studied as a student in Japan for a year and in an anthropology / documentary class, each student was asked to make a class project about Tokyo — the city where we were living. During the course, I realize to some degree, working with the actual image and working with images in language was quite similar, and in visual story telling, the image could be even more unprocessed and raw, as in writing what we see as a whole frame had to be abstracted, crystalized and retold with the very cubist pointto-point words, which somehow allow us a freer space for imaginary but less direct and strong as the visual image itself.

Growing up speaking Chinese, the way my brain processes the information it takes in and output in another form, either texts or visual images, is very much like the language itself — with no fixed grammar and always maintaining some ambiguity. In Chinese, most noun can be used as a verb without changing any forms; in the same text, it really depends on the reader’s mood of that specific day that how he or she wants it to be, and could result in dramatic or subtle differences. I try to incorporate this trait of language into my filmmaking, where image and image is aligned together, but not tied up by a strict grammar telling us which image functions what, and to different people at different time

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We want to take a closer look at the genesis of your film: what attracted you to this project?

surfers — very romantic name — regularly.

He has an impressive kitchen and would spend more then ten hours to cook a meat dish. During my stay there we talked a fair amount, and I got to know more about him as well as his thought on couch surfing in a modern urban environment in general. Nate used to be a language teacher in Japan and he told me a story happened between him and a Japanese student: she invited him to a Japanese circle where everyone including herself was speaking Japanese, but Nate managed to understand what she was talking about somehow just because that he was so familiar with the tone of her voice and the way she would say things. He also talked about the feeling of living in New York, problems of housing, feel of loneliness and isolation in a crowd, frustration of wanting to become an artist but could not find a way to achieve what he wanted, which made me think a lot.

In the winter of 2014 I was traveling alone in New York and couch surfing on a guy I got in contact through the internet. His name was Nate, and he was the original figure of Nate in White Mushroom, Black Earth. Nate lives in Brooklyn by himself and has been hosting

During my stay in New York, a friend recommend me go check out the Earth Room.

I did not find much material about it online — very limited image (later I found out why) and several short commentaries from which I could not get the idea of it. So I went, and

and space the same visual materials could be read differently. I used to be a journalist and photojournalist in China, where the government has a strong control over nearly all media which makes getting one’s idea out using the type of clear, easily accessible plain news writing style relatively difficult. The years being in that system spoiled my cryptic ambiguous storytelling tendency where thoughts and meanings are hidden, await to be discovered and opened again. It’s very challenging but playful and rewarding — for both writers and readers — adds a lot of fun and poetic aspect to the sometimes dull, plain, mundane life, and makes people notice the beauty and unusual qualities of things that are normally taken for granted. My whole life as a story teller is all about that.

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met there with my advisor Sarah who taught at Temple University. We had a wonderful half hour there, and talked about in a city like New York where there’s nowhere to see real soil and land was so scarce a resource, it was even luxurious to have a space like the Earth Room sitting in the middle of city, existing as the container of the soil, doing nothing — I felt I sank into the moment and for a long time the smell and moisture of the earth stayed with me. I got so intrigued by that earth room and wanted to do something with its presence. I have been doing research online, reading about New York SoHo area’s history and one day I came across an interview with Bill Dilworth the earth room keeper. He was talking about how white mushroom used to pop out really fast and he would pick them up to not having those distracting visitor’s eyes from the vast darkness of soil. It somehow amused me and I felt this mass of earth really had some sense of humor.

I also felt that the earth room was so void and empty although with the solid earth occupying the space, but one’s spirit flies in there, very free, you can put all kinds of thoughts into the soil like planting seeds. The earth is dreaming and breathing and you do not know when or what you will harvest. But once it’s there, it’s there.

Everything seems so mesmerizing to me in that room. I just can’t get it off my mind. I currently

live in Philadelphia, PA; before that I was in Shanghai; even further before I lived in Tokyo, and none of the cities was the land that I feel tied to. As I am walking in the street of a new place I always feel somehow like an alien and have hard time finding my sense of belonging. For some reason when I was standing by the earth, staring into the space from the small door — I felt peaceful and some connection between me and the land was formed. I talked a little bit about this feeling in the latter part of the film.

In your film you make an earnest attempt to fuse observational documentary and narrative cinema. We have been deeply impressed by your imaginary and minimalist language, how did you develop your filmmaking style?

I am a very quiet kid when I was little and sometimes I would do nothing, just sat there looking at the world, and trying to construct stories from whatever materials I had at the moment — characters from a book that I recently read, things that passed in front of my eyes, shapes and colors, temperatures, random dialogues caught by my ears — just improvised with everything in that moment. This tendency still exists in my character, and that might be able

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to count for the observational style while telling a story you mentioned in the question. On top of that, I was a photojournalist for three years, and had been frequently out in the field capturing funny moments glimpsed in the busy world. The first thing about observing with a camera is to feel comfortable with your hands holding the camera and your ‘point of view’. There’s no unintentional photography — all photography choose the part they want to present and put it in the center of the frame and eliminate the part they do not want to present and cut it out. One need to be confident and strong enough to not feel guilty or weak about the choice the decision you make. It’s okay to have one’s own interpretation of the world and portrait it in that way instead of overemphasizing the dehumanizing objectiveness, because once people sense the authorship from the picture, they would know that’s an argument the photographer made, not a fact that should be taken granted — this is what I believe in, or this is the ideal situation that I am hoping for. The photojournalist experience resulted in a very blunt and daring way of me looking at the world with the camera; also gives me a pair of sharp eyes to notice the interesting thoughtful moments during their happening.

White Mushroom, Black Earth is the first film of this kind that I made — heavily relies on voice over narrations and ambiguous image. I am not completely a visual artist — the spine in all of my works, no matter how experimental they are, would come back to telling a story. I have been trying to incorporate literature into visual storytelling for a long time, and am always curious how text and image would interact with each other in such a case. I did it intuitively, hoping to not restrict viewer’s imagination with the text and allowing a distance between text and image to let grow of free association. A faculty at Temple University came to me and said, since we had so many ‘essay film’, why not calling this one a ‘poetry film’? Maybe. My writing style — even in English — display a very Eastern pattern, very Chinese and very Japanese, Haiku-ish.

Sometimes I feel something in the world but cannot find the right word to describe that feeling in English, or pretty much any language, I would just describe what I have seen under what condition, trying to reconstruct the field in which my thoughts was generated, in the hope that other people would be able to feel something from that field as well.

Your film is marked by an elegantly structured storytelling: each shot is carefully orchestrated to work within the overall structure, drama is stripped down to its essential elements to introduce gaps and temps mort. How did you develop the script

and structure of White Mushroom, Black Earth?

Everything came pretty naturally — more or less like improvise. Before I went to New York, I had a script loosely written — now I cannot remember much detail about that one. Several key elements were Nate, Asuka, earth room, white mushroom and New York. As I was walking in the city, those characters started to move and interact on their own as was recorded on the camera. I was still very much like a photojournalist and was constantly attracted to the unusual, the sarcastic and the little humor in everyday life. I spent nearly two days in the earth room and talked to Bill and Brian — Brian only works on Sunday and got to know more about what had happened in the past here in that room.

The audience participants are also very inspiring.

And New York itself is a city provocative enough.

My feel about the room shifted subtly and for a while I stopped thinking of the script and just focus on the moment as long as the key elements I mentioned above were involved.

I went back to Philadelphia and while all the memories were still fresh I started editing. I rethought it through — what was the story I wanted to tell and what was the message I wanted to include — and rewrote a different storyline, and it’s almost the one we hear in White Mushroom, Black Earth. To get a sense of how long the film would be, thought I intended to have a native speaker do the voiceover narration, I recorded a very rough version with my phone of my own reading and started to work on the image. I listened to how the script sounded like and decided the slots and length that I need to fill in with shots. When adding visuals, I considered both the relationship between images — meaning composition, color, shape, content — and also the relationship between image and narration. I did not want the image and narration to work to close with each other; that would eliminate the space where ambiguity and playfulness generates new, personal meaning because the audience is allowed to add in their own materials. When the timeline was completed, there’s just fine tuning and little tweaks to make everything seems neater.

Before I went to graduate school, when I was still an amateur video lover, I did all the editing with music and was extremely dependent on the beats and rhythm of the music. Those adds to the flow of the video and the way I did it even felt like cheating. But in general I care about the beats and rhythm, the acoustic impression of the film a lot, even with voice over narration. I meant to have someone else narrated; however after showing the first rough cut to a circle of friends everyone begged me to keep it and said that’s part of what made this weird sequence work. I

felt very strange at first, but listened to the feedbacks and kept my own voice there, of course did a couple of re-recording.

How did you conceive the character of Asuka?

New York is a big lonely city in a way — and I want Nate to have someone that he could talk to; and the Japanese student Nate met in Japan came to my mind — I want this person that Nate is constantly in conversation with a girl with a Japanese name. Asuka is actually a family name instead of a first name, it means ‘flying birds’ — an image that intrigues me but not necessarily works the same way with English native speakers. I picked up the name anyway. The name with its meaning explained is very telling about the character of the person; in the story Nate was pictured as an individual who came to New York to do art but find the city indifferent and not cooperating in a way and always had an attitude; Asuka should be someone with similar attitude, but everything Nate wanted to achieve but could not since he choose to stay in New York. So in short, Asuka is a symbol of another possibility, of things we want, Nate wants, that come true elsewhere. She should be free spirit, improvising, spontaneous, brave, innocent, idealistic and strong. She knows what she wanted and not wanted. This character also has to carry a certain sense of absurdity, which Nate does not have, or

not allowed to have — suppressed by the system and the urban machine.

Your cinema is rich of references ranging from Chantal Akerman to Philippe Garrel.

Can you tell us who were your chef influences?

I would say Yoko Ono and her Grapefruit is my main influence. Her ideas of happenings, events and instructions are both my inspirations and methodologies. In White Mushroom, Black Earth I asked each participants to show me how they feel about the art piece instead of telling it, and this is an example of instruction, and an instruction need to be activated by the audience in order to produce individual meanings; if not activated, they are just plain text with no magic at all. Whether to agree and follow the instruction or not is a choice of the participant. Similarly, the film itself is a field where I hope thoughts could be generated — a lot of things remain ambiguous here and the audience are invited to walk through the city with me, to feel or imagine the earth room (they could not see it) with all the other participants in the film and me — if they can sense my existence behind the camera. If the audience choose to enter this field and identify themselves there, the film would be activated and speak to them. For those who are expecting a clear definition to be explicitly spelled out, unfortunately this film refuse to give away any easy answer. That’s the hidden instruction, that

one has to be willing to open up and participate in the formation of meanings, and the formation of meanings would happen every time the film is watched by a different reader. I always consider myself a writer; even a filmmaker could be a writer in a broader sense — he or she writes in visual language. So my chief influence is very much coming from literature and text when it comes to structure and thought process, instead of existing visual work. For me, text is always the spine, and that is why all my works — no matter how experimental they are — cannot be a pure visual experience or entertainment. They have to be encoded with meanings, messages and stories.

Janet Cardiff and her audio walks is another important source of inspiration. A lot of her works are very filmic, and she uses sound to really immerse the audience into the experience. She is very good at using environmental sound, and all her audio walks are narrated by herself. Her voice has a very mesmerizing quality to it and it blends into her works so well. When I was reading the text I had her voice in mind.

From a visual point of view, White Mushroom, Black Earth is a layered and complex work.

Can you tell us something about the making process of your film?

Intentionally I used a lot of long and slow fade in and out. It happens mostly between stationary city shots. Those create the most direct layer one could

see in the film — images, colors and movements, disappearance of one thing and the emergence of the other. I wanted the film to have a slow breathing pace with subtle but engaging cut and slow dissolve was the method I was experimenting with. I used reflections a lot in my shots, and figures would blur, become hard to recognize other than shape and colors, and those distorted images worked extremely well with dissolves because the concrete, realistic aspect of the object had already been taken out and what was left behind — unwrapped piles of masses — just get along easily.

There are many long stationary shots in the film; however, I want to include movements in each single shots. The film was shot handheld, and the shakiness adds some unexpected fluctuation to the film, as well as the moving figures or characters in the shot. The animation of the growing mushroom served for the same purpose; but they do not necessarily always connected to the content of film. They are even more like naughty kids on the playground. They own the space and run about, here and there and you cannot ignore. A friend I have been knowing from high school did the animation for me without knowing much of the film. She was in China and we had 12 hours time difference in between. So more or less the mushrooms seemed confused, as if they were not so sure where they are and what they were doing, which is exactly how I wanted them.

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What challenges did you face while making White Mushroom, Black Earth?

The most apparent one was, the New York Earth Room is an art piece that does not allow any kind of photography. To a visual story teller, it’s a challenge to tell the story without showing the most important key element to people’s eyes. A friend who watched the film later even comment it to be ‘anti-film’ because he could not see the room I was talking about all the time. I myself was very happy with the solution I came up with — inviting participants and making their experience the main subject of the film. Originally I had a different plan which would need the actual Nate’s acting; he texted me after I got to New York telling me that he was sick and was not feeling happy to be on camera. I was there in the city with all the gears I checked out from Philadelphia, and did not know what to do for a while. I decided to go to the earth room anyway and see what would happen there, just improvise. Then there was this nice clean wall in the office next to the earth room site where the earth room keeper lived his life and he did not mind having some talking heads coming in as long as I did not ruin the earth room or the viewers viewing experience. I did not. In fact I feel that, being asked to retell the story without verbal language set free a lot of people’s a mind, and enhanced their experience by asking them to feel their own feeling and share it with this limited primitive clumsy way. I meant the experience to be a gift.

What do you want people to remember after seeing White Mushroom, Black Earth?

People cannot really ‘remember’ anything ‘from the film’ because I did not give out much information. Instead I put them to wonders. They would see all those weird faces trying so hard to express something with their audio shut, and a great many loosely tied up images full of ambiguity which making very little apparent sense, and strange animation that sometimes would show up carelessly regardless of their surrounding and this hypnotic voice — oversentimental talking about a story of two characters whom one might or might not feel related to.

Going through all these, I want the viewer to be saturated with confusions and even frustrations and curiosity. I want them to go back into their own memory to pull out experience to fill in the empty hole this film has dug in their heart. I hope everyone can understand the meaning of the earth room in their own way and find themselves a place that they would constantly go to and meditate. It does not have to be a physical place in reality. But it should be a place rich in metaphors and associations. That’s a gift from the earth room, and from me.

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?

Cinema as an art form should not be labeled by one’s gender. When I start out to make films I would not specially think that I am a female. I am a filmmaker. I sense things from the world, take them in with the camera and represent them on the new medium; or I have things that I want to say and rather say it with visual language. As an artist, I do not think being a woman or not would change the nature of filmmaking. However, realistically speaking, the voice of woman has long been ignored given this social-historical condition that gender inequality does exist and might continue to exist for a bit longer. Speaking of the future, on the one hand we do see more and more women are entering film industry, and more opportunities focused on providing these women a place to speak up are opening up. On the other hand, I hope one day women in film industry could be strong enough to a degree not having to be protected by women film festival or diversity rules.

Since I am here speaking up as a woman artist at a woman art magazine — I want to say that being a women is not an advantage nor disadvantage. It is something about how the society see women and how women see themselves — both have a long way to go. I hope things will become better.

Thanks for your time and thought, Mengxi.

We wish you all the best with your career.

What's next for Mengxi Rao? Have you a particular film in mind?

Yes. New projects are coming along. I am working on two other experimental pieces. Both are commenting on identity and cross cultural experience. Meanwhile, the main project that I am working on is actually a dance performance piece called ‘Touch’. Touch is a dance performance exploring the physical contact happening between two dancers during the course of contact improvisation. Using wearable sensors, selected audience members will collaborate with the dancers. Employing computer based technology, the shifting weight, pressure and movements between participants will be transformed into a immersive light and sound experience. Issues of race, culture, gender and age will play a role in this multi-sensory performance with the radical implications of the act of touching. One can always go to a performance and watch it, but it feels different when you touch it. This is still quite an open idea and I am looking for discussions and collaborations in all areas.

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silvia lasmar Ecdise (Brazil, 2015)

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experimental cinema

Silvia Lasmar's work focuses on the tensions between perception, memory and subjectivity. In Ecdise she mixes traditional notions of surrealism with a deep interest in complex psychological models. We are pleased to present Silvia Lasmar for this year's CinéWomen Edition. Silvia, how did you get started in experimental cinema?

I have never actually thought about film as my medium, but since I moved to Los Angeles from São Paulo, I have been surrounded by the film community here, in addition to fine arts. My husband is a filmmaker and together we share a passion for film and photography but in my mind, filming was my husband’s medium and I was focused on working closely with the directors to create the visual concepts for their films. I became a

production designer but I was not thinking about telling my own stories at that time. One day I decided to take this class called “Installation Concepts” in order to learn more and keep practicing what I was already doing with sculpture and installations. They changed the scope of the class to “Video Installation” at the last minute and only informed the students about it on the first day of class. They gave us the option to drop it if we were not interested in it but I decided to stay. In that moment, I realized it would be challenging but very interesting to add image and sound to my installations, also gaining the resource to mix stillness and motion. This is how everything serendipitously started.

We want to take a closer look at the genesis of your film: how did you come up with the idea for Ecdise?

I started making this short film thinking about a video installation and the surrounding environment that affects the audience. In that week I re-read a short story called Ecdise, written by Paulo Zoppi and it inspired me to make the film. This narrative puts the reader in a disturbing emotional and mental state and proposes a reflection on the body-mind duality that is intrinsic to the human condition. For me, the narrative instantly evoked a dream-like state of mind and I started thinking in a fluid, organic motion of images. I would say that the film Ecdise does not follow Zoppi’s narrative directly but is the portrayal of the sensory experience the reading stirred within me.

Ecdise plays with the notion that images tend to exist in continuum, residing somewhere in memory, whereas sound tends to evoke the

present moment. Can you introduce our readers to this fundamental idea behind Ecdise?

When I made Ecdise, especially when I was editing it, I was looking for contrasts between external and internal influences, consciousness and unconsciousness, individual and shared experiences. I see it as an individual journey to a search for identity within oneself through the physicality and materiality, going deep to the level of blood and cells. This journey happens also through sound, touch, vision, memories and unconsciousness. I find it challenging to categorize how sound and image evoke time or impact the human experience. I think that sound evokes sensations, memories and also past and present experiences. I also believe sound resides somewhere in memory and that in a single moment we

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can experience more than one temporal reality.

Could you take us through your creative process when starting a new project?

Each work follows a different process but usually after I fall in love with a concept or an idea I start reading, watching films and experimenting. It is really important for me to immerse myself in the subject of the work. I bring new materials to my studio when I am creating a sculpture, I am constantly filming moments and concepts, I go to the locations, I talk to people, etc. It is always a process with no rules and a lot of visual improvisations and problem solving until I achieve the desired result I am looking for.

Since the first scene the viewer

enters into a dreamy filmic mystery.

Your film invites the viewer into a haunted, totally subjective flow of clean figurative images, taking at heart Michael Snow's words "I wish to abandon imitation and illusion and enter directly into the higher drama of celluloid". How did you develop your visual imagery?

The visual imagery for Ecdise was created based on the idea of capturing raw images with a macro lens, extremely close up, very organic and real. There is no retouching or visual effects. It is the reality the way it was – flesh, nails, skin, wrinkles, hair, etc. I filmed myself, my husband and also I had him film me for the underwater sequence. Everything was shot inside my house. It is like an invitation to my individual psycho-physical subjectivities and unconsciousness, with no imitation

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and it is structured to be a non-verbal experience. The visual imagery was created to support a sensorial installation where my intentions should fuse with the audience’s intentions and subjective perception.

When did you get in touch with Paulo Zoppi's short story for the first time?

Paulo Zoppi is a very talented Brazilian writer and a friend of mine.

Ecdise is my favorite short story from a series called Emsimesmices that I was lucky to read it about four years ago. The whole series is amazing, but I was especially drawn to Ecdise because of the main character who starts paying attention to the parts of himself he is losing every day – hair, nails, blood, cells, etc. I interpret this as his consciousness somehow falling outside the domain of the physical

and haunting him with disconcerting questions: Are these parts of myself?

How much of myself goes away together with these parts? Does my individuality want to abandon me? I think what I like the most in Zoppi’s stories is that his descriptions show ordinary neuroses, so common to humans in a simple and sensorial way that for me is very visual.

We have previously mentioned Michael Snow. Can you tell us your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work?

I am constantly being influenced by everything that surrounds me. Gary Hill says that he is influenced by “very mundane little happenings” and I feel the same way. It’s not only the community around me that influences me, but sensations, readings, materials, surfaces, noises, animals,

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conversations, poetry, films, art. I have my favorite artists of course, but it is hard to pinpoint individually how they affect my work because everything is very mixed somewhere in my mind and it is that mélange in its entirety that contributes to the projects I create. There is one person who I can easily say has influenced the formation of my foundation in film and that is my husband, Jean Paulo Lasmar.

As I mentioned previously, he is a filmmaker, and the films he makes are very different from the ones I make because he is much more of a storyteller who usually follows a narrative. But, he gave me my first professional camera and taught me how to use it and more importantly, how to see and frame what I am seeing with a lot of sensibility and a beautiful sense of composition. Some

of my other influences come from constantly studying my favorite artists in a variety of different fields: Pierre Huyghe, Agnes Varda, Akira Kurosawa, Gary Hill, Bill Viola, Stan Brakhage, Anish Kapoor, Cornelia Parker, Ernesto Neto, Juan Muñoz, Italo Calvino, among others.

Thanks for sharing your time, Silvia, we wish you all the best with your filmmaker career.

What's next for you? Have you a particular film in mind?

Thank you! I am working on few different art projects. Currently I am collaborating with another artist in a new installation project that plays with the themes of space, gravity, and orientation. Also I am working in a new experimental film that will explore the concepts of abandonment and chronic psychological disorders.

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cherilyn williams Insurration USA, 2015

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independent cinema

Insurration is a psychological horror story about a young med student, Nicole, who believes that her sister is being possessed and is willing to go to any extreme to save her. Cherilyn Williams and Alyssa Bybee cleverly subvert horror genre clichés in their smartly-written, elegantly executed piece Insurration. Their atmospheric style proofs to be fitting as a counterpart of the emotional rollercoaster their characters live through.

Cherilyn and Alyssa, tell us about your trajectory as a filmmaker. What inspired you to express yourself in this medium?

Cherilyn: I actually don’t remember my initial inspiration to become a filmmaker. I started writing scripts at a very young age. My first documented script drafts were from when I was 8 years old. I continued writing periodically throughout my childhood and young adult life but I didn’t actually make my first film until January 2014. So I am very new to being a filmmaker and director and am still only a very early student of the medium. Insurration was my first attempted venture into the horror genre, though I had been a fan of horror films for many years prior. Writing screenplays seemed, when I was young, to be the most conducive means to paint these stories that started coming to me. Venturing into being the director of those projects came very naturally as I had been so tightly invested in the story and the characters through the long writing process.

Alyssa: For me, growing up, I loved to create my own stories. Usually it wasn’t anything too concrete, I would scribble down a few lines of an idea for a story in anything I could find or come up with scenes to act out with my friends. It wasn’t until I was about 11 or so that I joined the Junior Theater organization where I started becoming more interested in directing and writing, and started realizing I was less interested in acting and being center stage. From there I kind of fell into filmmaking, which was a much better medium for me to express myself. I was able to take some production classes in school.

Back in my hometown, San Diego, there’s a place called the Digital Gym where they have a ton of great classes and opportunities for people interested in filmmaking as well as other mediums. My uncle owns a lighting and grip company and he was able to help me grow a lot as

a filmmaker and learn from him. From there I made my first short in 2010 with some friends.

The next years, I made another short by myself, writing, directing, filming, and producing it, and I’ve been making films ever since. Working with Cherilyn on Insurration was an amazing experience. It wasn’t my first time working in the horror genre, and I’ve been a long time fan of horror, but it’s definitely very unique, and I think that really came out from a mixture of her story, and our ability to build ideas off of one another to delve away from a lot of cliches.

We want to take a closer look at the genesis of your film: how did you come up with the idea for Insurration?

Cherilyn: There were several things that lead to the creation of this film. I have grown up around hospitals for various reasons and have always felt very at home there in a strange way. I am also a psychology and criminal justice double major right now and have always been fascinated with criminal profiling and giving more meaning to what others may call a meaningless crime or unnecessary bloodshed. The very first image that came into my head is the first sequence you see in the film, before the titles, where Nicole walks by Allie, tied to her chair, with blood dripping from Allie’s arm and Nicole’s scalpel. With imagery like that, I just knew that I had to create something that would hopefully grow to be unique and unexpected. The actual thing that lead to the creation of the film was the first time I watched the Soska Twins’ incredible film, American Mary.

That film is the reason this one exists.

In your film you play a certain number of games with your audience: Insurration is atmospheric, multi-layered and more meaningful with every viewing. What’s your writing process like?

Cherilyn: First of all, thank you so much for your kind words! The writing process was actually pretty short. I had played around with some of the concepts and images in prior screenplays that will never see the light of day but lent greatly to the creation of Insurration. After I saw American Mary, different thoughts kept bouncing around in my head until I came up with those first initial images and scenes. From there, I just sat down

and wrote it. Very little changed after the first draft. I went through numerous times to fine tune, but only one thing really changed. In my original thinking, I had not planned on Allie and Nicole on being sisters. For one of those unexplained reasons when something just comes into your mind, I decided that this would be an interesting twist to the story. That was a very last minute addition that changed, I believe, within the week before we started filming. It was the minor details, many of which occurred during the process of filming, that lead to the atmosphere and intricacy of the film.

The first time we watched Insurration we immediately thought of Cronenberg. Who were some of your chief influences?

Cherilyn: At the time I created this film, I knew very little about the horror genre as a whole. I had not viewed any of Cronenberg’s work until after the film was completed. As I mentioned briefly before, the key influence for this was Jen and Sylvia Soska. It was watching their films and interviews and their pure, infectious love for what they do that really inspired me to make this film. Aesthetically, American Mary was the chief influence. I fell in love with the beautiful

artistry of the film and the detail and humanity of the characters. Mary Mason is a character that most people would not want to like due to the things she does, but due to the brilliant writing and creation of the film, you can’t help but feel for her and want her to win. I wanted Nicole to be the same way in Insurration. While Nicole is driven by the little girl, Alice, to do these terrible things to her sister, Allie, we see her pain and difficulty coming to terms with what she believes is required of her to save her family. Another film that influenced me was Copycat. While not a horror film, per se, the claustrophobic look and disorienting filming style helped me greatly to develop the look of Insurration. Outside of films or individuals, a lot of inspiration came from images and sounds. I did a lot of research on old methods for curing possession or insanity, which is where the bloodletting came from. I would also look through thousands of photos on Google Images or Pinterest from very generic keywords like blood, horror, insanity, etc. While the majority of photos had little influence on me, there were several images that resulted from those searches that I would draw off of for the atmosphere and tone of the film. It really was influenced by multi-sensory media. I also found

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many accounts of auditory hallucinations and recreations of them. This not only influenced the sound, but the look of the film.

a lot of other subgenres of horror and put them together, while still having it stand on its own away from most other films out there.

Alyssa: Personally, i’ve always been a huge fan of the horror genre and all of its sub-genres, which is one of the reasons I really wanted to work on this project. I have been a fan of Cronenberg for awhile, so it is a great compliment to be compared to his work. Thank you for your praise. But during pre-production and during production while we were running through ideas of how we wanted the film to look, his work didn’t really come to mind. As Cherilyn has mentioned, American Mary was the biggest influence. I watched it before starting production to get a feel of what we wanted to convey and what sort of atmosphere we wanted in our film. We had also talked about it being very aesthetically close to a gorehouse film, so along those lines we gave a lot of attention to make up and props in order to really show the horrible things that Nicole was willing to do to her own sister. But we also wanted it to be more layered than that, because it’s more about showing that she’s willing to do these things in order to save her and have the audience give her sympathy, so we played with

How did you come across your actresses and how did you work with them?

Cherilyn: It was very easy to find all of the actors, as I work at ManeStage Theatre Company in Sumner, Washington with a large number of extremely talented actors. I knew who I wanted to play the roles shortly after writing them. Out of necessity, in terms of scheduling, I played Allie myself. In terms of working with Kayli, who played Nicole, we would mostly email or talk with each other to really flesh out Nicole’s mental state and backstory. I felt like that was most critical.

Working with Isabella Vigna (Bella), who played the little girl Alice, was different. Due to her young age, she was only there for her shots and not the rest of the film. It was a challenge to figure out a way to explain her character to her and the situation in a way she would understand at her age. Thankfully, Bella is a natural and needed very little explanation and came up with many things in the film that were better than I would ever have thought of.

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Alyssa: I hadn’t met any of the actors until the first day of filming, and walked in to it with everyone else already knowing each other and having worked with one another. But it was still so easy to work with them, they all had such a great talent, especially Bella at such a young age was a lot of fun to work with. They had already had a really good grasp on their characters, and what they were suppose to do within the story. There were even times when all of us were trying to figure out how to film different scenes, since, let’s face it, you can only follow a storyboard so much. Something always changes. It was a very collaborative effort amongst all of us and very natural to troubleshoot and find the best way to do something.

What is your preparation with actors in terms of rehearsal? Did you rehearse a lot with the shots you prepared in advance?

Cherilyn: In terms of rehearsals, I normally like to have at least one read through, if not multiple, and then work one on one with each actor to go into detail about backstory and character develop and to answer any potential questions they may have at that point.

Insurration was very different, however. This film was made for a filmmaking class at Seattle University and was done on a very tight schedule. We were lucky that the actors could be there for filming, let alone rehearsal. Other than my initial discussions with Kayli and Bella, we never rehearsed. Many of the scenes in the film were the first take we did. We would do multiple takes, but the first always seemed the freshest and most natural. As with the actors, none of the shots were rehearsed. We did a shot list and storyboard before filming but we never had the time to rehearse them prior to filming Alyssa: We definitely had to keep a very steady pace once we were filming, especially with the amount of set up we put into the room and with make up, we had very little time to rehearse anything or do very many reshoots. There were a few cases where we really needed to do a quick run through before actually shooting, the scenes with more actions, like when Allie is thrown into the room, or when we see Allie being choked by Nicole, we would do quick run throughs for safety and to figure out logistics and the flow of the scenes. But as for the other scenes, those were done brief, and the shots we used were usually the first shots, it just seemed

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more realistic, and flowed a lot better as a whole that way.

What was the most challenging thing about making this film?

Cherilyn: There were two main things that were challenging. I would say the most challenging was the schedule. We filmed Insurration over the course of two weekends, if I remember correctly, and most of those days we only had the actors for 3-4 hours at a time. There was only one day where were able to film for 10 hours. The deadline for the class and the actors schedules made it extremely difficult to get everything done, but I was lucky to have very dedicated actors and crew who would work their hardest at all times to make this film what we all wanted it to be. We also only had about a week and a half to two weeks for postproduction due to the class deadline. We went back and fine tuned things after that, but we had to get the film into a solid state very quickly. The other challenge was the result of an accident that happened early on the first day of filming. There was one scene we rehearsed multiple time due to safety concerns. It’s towards the end of the film, when Nicole throws

Allie to the floor after she escapes. I am a trained martial artist and have experience in physical comedy and combat, so I know how to fall safely. The stunt went fine every time we practiced it, but the one and only time we ended up filming it, I tripped on the desk and slammed my head onto the thinly carpeted concrete floor. This resulted in a concussion.

Since we were just starting filming, I kept going but this resulted in a lot of problems with focusing and remembering lines that I think really slowed down production.

Alyssa: That fall was the one unfortunate thing about filming this. It was terrible that Cherilyn had to keep going like that but she still did a great job acting in the rest of the film and codirecting. Besides that, I think one of the most challenging part of filming for me was, of course, the schedule. It’s stressful trying to get everything in and get the end product you want, but it was also the size of the crew. This was the first time I had worked on a crew this small, especially for something as complex as this. At any given time I think we had maybe two or three people on crew. With everyone’s schedule, and us trying to accomplish what we wanted, we really couldn’t get more people.

And with the size of the room, we probably couldn’t have fit any more people in there to begin with. So that was something I needed to get used to really fast, as well as have to do about five different things at once, as did everyone else.

There was one point where I was working the audio, holding a light in one hand to get the lighting right for the scene, and in the other hand I had the camera, and was crouched like that for awhile. And even though that was a bit of a challenge, I actually really liked that a lot better, it gave both me and Cherilyn a lot more creative control over the project, and there was less opinions in the mix making it run more smoothly in that sense.

Do you think it is harder for women directors to have their projects green lit?

Alyssa: In my experience, as a small scale independent filmmaker and student filmmaker that really hasn’t been the case. I’ve actually worked with a lot more women filmmakers and directors than I have men. And I know quite a few who have gained a significant amount of recognition for their work, and have been given great opportunities, as we have. However, outside of that, I have recognized that women directors

and filmmakers have been marginalized, and because of that I do think there is a struggle to have their works greenlit in comparison to their male counterparts. And I think that has a lot to do with how we view women on film, just as much as we do off film, and also how significant the gap has been between the number of men and the number of women filmmakers. However, on a more positive note there has been a great increase of women filmmakers, as well as female characters who are strong and independent all around the world. So we’re definitely moving in the right direction to close gaps I feel.

Cherilyn: Similar to Alyssa, I have not had any difficulties myself in finding support for my films and myself as a filmmaker. The majority of the other filmmakers I know and have worked with are women. I have, however, found that many people are shocked and think it’s not normal or is weird that I, a petite and relatively quiet woman, would be make the kind of films I do. I have received some rather pointed comments from people stating that they do not support horror films and are shocked that I would have any interest in them whatsoever. Most people guess by looking at me that I make lighter films. It is this fact of stereotyping people by their look and gender that

can make it hard for women to gain support for their projects, if it is not a project someone would imagine a woman to make. This is also the reason why I, when I direct, go by C.M. Williams instead of my full name, Cherilyn. It doesn’t allow someone to judge my directing style and me personally before they see the film just based off my gender.

Thanks for sharing your time, Cherilyn and Alyssa, we wish you all the best with your filmmaker career. What's next for you?

Have you a particular film in mind?

Cherilyn: Thank you for this opportunity!

There’s a lot happening next for us. In regards to films, there are a couple. We are about to begin filming a feature version of Insurration! I am very excited for this project. It uses all the material from the short film but continues it and expands it in very unexpected ways. In terms of the story and characters, the short film only just scratches the surface of what is really going on.

There is another project that I am currently writing that I am very excited about.

No one knows about it, not even the rest of my crew! It’s called With Love and Blood-Soaked Kisses. It focuses on the story of two women, a

painter and a criminal profiler, who find a new medium to express themselves and cash in on society’s obsession with murder and criminals. I can’t say anymore yet, but I am very excited to see this work come to life! Also, this isn’t anything that is actually happening, but it is a dream of mine right now to work with Jessica Cameron and the Soska Twins. A girl can dream, right? Maybe someday!

Alyssa: Thanks again for having us, this has been an amazing experience! As Cherilyn said, we’re going to get started on Insurration the feature, which will be great to dive back into and expand more on the story, and see where these characters have been, as well as where they’re going. I’ve also been working on two different projects that are in pre-production right now, but I’m hoping to get them going within the new few months. One is going to be a dark comedy web series that I’ve been working on, on and off again, for the past year. but has been really coming together lately. And the second is going to be a feature length thriller that unearths a small town’s buried secret, and how far people would go to protect the “common good.” It’s still really rough, but I’m having way too much fun writing it right now

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luz dafne corona piñera Nuberto (Canada, 2015)

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animated cinema

Nuberto is a visually rich and emotionally captivating journey, careening from the lyrical to the surreal. Experimenting with color as an intimate expression of the children’s inner worlds, a tool for psychological investigation, this dreamlike animated film, echoes the oldest forms of cinema. From the first time we watched Luz Dafne Corona Piñera's work, we thought of Yuri Norstein's visionary world.

We are pleased to present Luz Dafne Corona Piñera for this year's CinéWomen Edition. Luz, tell us about your trajectory as a filmmaker and animator. What inspired you to express yourself in this medium?

When I was 14 years old there was a TV show called Flash MTV where creators from all Latin America sent their flash animations to be featured on the channel. At that time I was trying a lot of new things like learning computer programming and web design, and I thought it would be really cool to learn about animation. I started to animate in flash and sent two pieces that were presented on the show. I kept on doing flash animation for the next couple years until I went to University to study Systems Engineering, but my passion for animation was really strong so I decided to pursue it professionally, I switched to a major in Digital Animation. After finishing

University, I won a scholarship to attend the Classical Animation program at Vancouver Film School where I created my short film Nuberto.

Animation is a hard an long process. How long does it usually take to finish a piece?

For this project, which was my graduation film from Vancouver Film School, I had four months from the moment I started developing the idea to the final piece. Due to the complexity an animation project supposes we were advised to keep it under three minutes.

Your work seems to be deeply influenced by the emotional

potential of color: can you comment this distinctive aspect of your animation style?

Colour is one of my favorite parts of the process, finding the right colour for my pieces in early stages allows me to see them more clearly to keep on pushing the design and improve the storytelling. Colour is the core of my projects, the way I try to connect with the audience.

Could you take us through your creative process when starting a new animated film?

I always carry a sketchbook with me, I like to sketch people and Ideas all the time ,so usually my ideas come from

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little sketches I do through the day, then I take the ones I feel have the most potential and I start developing the ideas further.

We want to take a closer look at the genesis of your film: how did you come up with the idea for Nuberto?

From the beginning I knew I wanted to do a piece that reflected the whole new experience I was living during my year at Vancouver Film School. I was new to Canada and one of the things that I was very excited about was to see snow for the first time. I brainstormed a lot of ideas involving stories in the form of legends that would tell the kids where the snow

came from. During that time I also happened to become very fond of candies and sweet treats ; while other people used to drink coffee to keep on going I used to eat candies, chips, and ice cream to do the same thing, so the idea of a story about candies started to come up to my mind.

Finally the two main ideas collided and came up together from some sketches I did while I was attending an animation conference, the story had the right amount of magic I was looking for, so I went for it.

Throughout your film you explore the blurry line between memory and fantasy, could you introduce our readers to this fundamental idea behind Nuberto?

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When you explore the blurry line between memory and fantasy, you can go wherever you want, you have no limits and this allows you to take your story to a world where everything is possible. Nuberto's world came up this way.

Nuberto reminded us of Yuri Norstein's work. Who among international artists and directors influenced your work?

I wasn't aware of Yuri Norstein films, but it's an honor to be compared to him, his work is unique. I love Mary Blair, especially the work she did for Cinderella, I think that's the biggest influence in my film. When I started exploring the world of animation I was influenced by cartoon's creators such as Craig McCracken and Genndy Tartakovsky, I was struck by the special care they put into their

show styles, and that had a lot of impact on me as a creator. I'm also influenced a lot by Illustration, specially Children's books.

We have been deeply fascinated by your use of symbols, from the first scenes the viewer enters into a dreamy filmic mystery. How did you develop your filmmaking style?

I'm still discovering my filmmaking style, my design approach has always been very graphic and childlike so I try to come up with stories that can add up to that feeling.

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

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the future of women in cinema and animation?

I know a lot of talented women animators who are incredible artists and whose projects are really innovating, so I think the futures seems really promising. I hope this trend continues, so more women can keep on contributing to the medium.

Thanks for your time and thought, Luz. We wish you all the best with your career. What's next for Luz Dafne Corona PiĂąera? Have you a particular film in mind?

Thank you very much for this opportunity, I'm really glad to be able to share my work with you. I have several ideas that I plan to work on, right now I'm working on a film idea which also came up during

my time at VFS, but it took me longer to develop it because it started being really complex. I'm also exploring different mediums, I've worked with Visual Effects before and I really want to make a short film that combines live action and VFX, I'm really excited about the possibilities this new medium will open.

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eija temisevä Something to tell ( Finland, 2015)

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experimental cinema

We love artists and cinematographers crossing the boundaries of cinematic genres.

From the first time we watched Eija Temisevä’ s work, we were impressed by her eclectic approach to filmmaking, playing on the originality and power of images in an area between the traditional and the innovative. We are pleased to present Eija Temisevä for this year's Cinéwomen Edition. Eija, how did you get started in experimental cinema?

I am a sculptor, graduated from Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 1986.

3-dimensional objects and the fact that I literally could touch the material were the most important things I was interested in sculpture. There was a psychological fact that ”I felt myself only a spiritual creature” and the concrete materials were something I needed ”to get a body”.

After making and teaching sculpture during 26 years I got tired of concrete materials and just by intuition took camera and started to film in 2012.

After that I felt I had found a new way to express myself. I had no education or experience of cinema. I just started

to make it. I felt that more abstract things like light, motion and time could replace the concrete materials.

Experimental cinema came naturally from the fact that I started to ”make experiments”.

For this year's Cinéwomen Edition we have selected , a refined work evoking a visionary imagery reminding us of Jarman's atmospheres. We want to take a closer look at the genesis of your film: how did you come up with the idea for ?

As I mentioned, psychological issues are very important in my art. I have been in my own psychotheraphy during many years. I think that in a way by making art I somehow try to solve again and again ”my subconcsious problems”. The relation with my mother was distant and I often felt ”I wanted her to speak to me about ”important women things” or myself to speak to her”, but it never happened.

So, I put the camera in front of me and put my soul into the situation where ”somebody tries to tell something to somebody else” and there was a big

conflict present all the time in mind. Of course I wanted to express generally how difficult it sometimes is to start to tell somebody else something that ýou feel very difficult.

We have been really impressed by the balance you have been capable of achieving in this work between classical sensibility and a contemporary vision. Your art reveals a strong presence of the four in traditional a fire overlay is clearly visible throughout the piece. Can you introduce our readers to this fundamental aspect of your work?

Fire means to me a very strong and intensive element. It is dangerous, inspiring and compelling. Even as it is something that can warm you up and is very cosy e.g. if you sit beside a fireplace.

In this video the picture of fire is on the face of the person and sometimes beside

the person. The fire is burning strongly and at the end nearly flaming out. The fire meets the feelings of the person in very symbolic way: at the same time strong, compelling and changing. Moreover the sound of the burning piece of fire wood is important (as well as the sighs and silent voices of the woman). In the video the fire has its orange and red colours but the woman is seen in black and white. So, the symbolic element (fire) seems to be more naturalistic in colour and the person more conceptual. So, that is one more ambivalent thing in the film.

You are a multidisciplinary artists. In the arsenal of artistic techniques that you use, can tell us in what manner your work as sculptress influences your videomaking?

As I told in the first answer the concrete materials and 3 D -quality were important to me in sculpture. In making videos one theme for me is to re-use my sculpture

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and make videos with them and about the themes they deal with. Moreover the lightning is important in my videos from the point of 3 dimensional view. It means that I often use the object in a film as a ”piece of sculpture”, something palpable and as a form and to get that impression I put the light in a certain way.

In you highlight the boundary between the mind and the act. The discrepancy between word and deed is a fundamental aspect of the creation process itself: can you introduce our reader to this theme, from an artist's point of view?

I think the words are overvalued when you think communication between people.

Words are just words and you can say anything without real contents. The acts, the gestures and the motions of the body often tell much more. In my video Something to tell the person doesn´t say any word but you can see and imagine

about her motions and facial expressions what is in her mind. The sighs and other voices tell their own story, too.

If we speak the creation process itself: word (as an idea) and deed (as the real act) belong together parallelly and in turn.

In the creation process it doesn´t go so that you just realize the idea. In the process they both appear ”hand in hand” and often changes occur just by intuition.

Your art is rich of references. Your video work reveals the influence of Greek and Roman art on the art of later centuries, yet your visual imagery seems to be closer to Derek Jarman's cinematography, think of your use of diagonal lines to suggest movement. Can you tell us your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work?

Sculpture of all ages and forms altogether have influences to my videos. I do not have any special artists or sculptors to

I think the words are overvalued when you think communication between people. Words are just words and yo can say anything without real contents.

“ �

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mention as an idol. Often I want to show in film the object/subject/main character 3 dimensionally (”sculpturally”): the light often comes from either side of the object so that the shadows show the object in a right way, so to say show its FORM. In ” Something to tell” video the light comes nearly in front of the face (from the same direction than camera): the form of the face is not important but the facial expressions.

A strong presence and the question of existence itself are very important concepts in my art. In the videos the rhythm, slowness and the right atmosphere are important. If we think about filmmakers, of course Ingmar Bergman is important for me because of his psychological acumen. The film The Passion of Joan Arc of Carl Dryer is very powerful in the intense presence and face of the leading role actress.

My own psychotheraphy has influenced a lot to my art because that process has given me many tools and views in human

nature. Moreover the Nature and the relation between a human being and the Nature are very inspiring to me. I could not live if I could not see trees from my window! I just adore trees and how they proudly stand the roots in the ground and the tops in the sky whatever the weather would be! When I film e.g. a tree outdoors then I do not care about the ”3 D influence with lights”: I just want to identify myself to the tree and get a ”zen” atmosphere.

Low-key lighting is constant of your to work, from : it is not a mere stylistic choice, since you seem to be fascinated by the psychological potential of shadows.

Can you better introduce us to this peculiar aspect of your cinema?

Yes, as I told earlier the right lighting and shadows are important for my videos. With dark background I can take up the objects/subjects of the film better

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and highlight just the most important object. The black backround also means that something happens in no special place but in a generally existing space.

With shadows I can emphasize the diversity of the objects/theme.

The subconscious world interest me a lot and with lights and shadows I can emphasize that point of view. Often the atmosphere I want to get is somehow mystic, absurd or ambivalent but in the same time harmonic and beautiful.

Could you take us through your creative process when starting a new project?

My way to start a process is often very intuitive. I just have some ”feeling” , ”atmosphere” or word to start. Then I just start to film. So, after having a lots of shoots I start to build up my video.

The contents and the main theme come step by step during the editing process.

Of course sometimes I just have a more

clearer idea and the process is more linear. I mostly make very short videos (3-5 min) and the genres I put them are video art or experimental cinema. Some are narrative and some are not. I would say that in generally my videos are poetic fragments of life. There is an idea of some incident or process and I try to make with video - moving pictures and some sounds - a ”living poem”.

Thanks for sharing your time, Eija, we wish you all the best with your filmmaker career. What's next for Eija Temisevä ? Have you a particular film in mind?

Just now I do not have any special idea, but because nature is so important to me and it is spring and the nature is just waking up from the sleep of winter, I am sure I will turn my eyes outdoors and enjoy the small details of nature and its miracles. I will put my soul into the nature.Thank you so much for your interest!