An interview with
Petra Brnardic Petra Brnardic's cinema embraces a surreal aestethic to explore the notions of body, identity and gender. Her experimental films convey a purely subjective, yet modernist, sensibility where the form conveys its meaning directly, and fully, blending a heady mix of philosophical idea, sexual frankness, and overt allegory. We are glad to present Petra's work for this Videofocus edition. Petra, first of all, how did you get started in filmmaking? I began to draw very early and I took my drafts very seriously as I sensed something was boiling inside. I always had that need to visualy express myself. And then in the beginning of the academy of fine arts I started to explore analogue photography first, recording myself and catching that tiny sparkles of life in things that surrounded me, like clothing, textures, dolls, hair, fluids, body parts, and it was all about those close-ups, where I tried to penetrate the core of those things, the pulsating vein of life in everything in my surroundings, which was the manifestation of my believing in animism. And then came digital photography, when I started frantically depicting my own face and body in different mental and emotional states, and in the end of that part of the journey I was overflooded by my own reflections, so I decided to use the dramatic potential those self-portraits carried, each one channeling some intense state of inner life, some turmoil, by putting them in relation that will tell a story through a moving picture, as a set of associations like in psychoanalysis. I also used internet pick-ups that were charged with hidden meanings and reflections of my psychical turbulencies. Everything was colorful, visceral and psychedelic and I wanted to merge specific aesthetics I built with the red line of the narrative. I had in mind all those trippy movie
dainties and gruesome scenery, begining from Bosch and Goya, and I wanted to unfroze my pictures and mix them in dancing viscosity. The sound, the moving and the aspect of time set pictures free, as they were confined in silent scream before. At the end of the studies I felt that it's time to make progression towards