Women Cinemakers meets
Christine Vandemoortele Lives and works in London, United Kingdom
On a journey through the night and into the day, a single monologue follows the speaker's exploration of some of the obstacles and burdens in his path. Eventually he learns to recognize them, before joyfully casting them aside as he gives himself up to the bliss of dawn. The anxieties and comfort of the night resolve into acceptance as dawn arrives and washes away any lingering fears. The primordial image of a cave lies at the root of human experience, and provides us with two conflicting realizations. The unyielding rock traps us in place, unable to progress. Yet it also protects us from outside forces and distractions. We are free to grapple with difficult truths and to confront our true selves.
An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com
Hello Christine and welcome to : before starting to elaborate about your film we would invite our readers to visit in order to get a wider idea about your artistic production and we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and you graduated from the in Brussels: how does your cultural substratum due to your training as a visual artist direct the trajectory of your artistic research? Moreover, what did direct you to explore the field of filmmaking? It's probably important to begin by explaining that although I trained in the visual arts, my personal experience of the world is
mainly through the sense of sound. My memories of places and people are, and have always been, very rooted in sound. I remember people's voices rather than their faces, and naturally this has colored the way I interpret the world. The result was that I had a natural inclination towards the aural which was supplemented by training in the visual arts. My training was in the early seventies in Belgium, and at the time students were pretty much free to do anything. We could develop projects into the most conventional or unconventional directions, with the support of our teachers. It gave me an excellent grounding in structure and scheduling. I also learned that the best approach for developing a new piece was finding something I personally wanted to explore, and then listening to the experiences of other people on the same subject. My first experience conceiving and producing a short film was " in 1998. This began as a series of " recorded interviews – no visuals. I was familiar with sound