Women Cinemakers meets
Sarah Shamash Lives and works in Vancouver, Canada
Informed by cinema, my practice is interdisciplinary, often collaborative, with conceptual and socially engaged underpinnings. I work through a variety of processes and mediums including sound, photography, video, film, sculpture, performance, installation, Internet and mobile devices. Influenced by cinema, my experimental projects typically explore identities and geographies as personal, political, feminine, and dynamic, while critiquing and subverting fixed, colonial and hegemonic demarcations of the body, territory, and space. I live on the territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tseil-Watuth First Nations in Vancouver where I work, parent, and study. I am currently a PhD candidate in UBC’s interdisciplinary program where I research film as a decolonial project with a focus on Latin American, Brazilian, Indigenous film and video. I make DIY films, I teach film studies and program films for the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival. I see my work as an artist, researcher, educator, and programmer as interconnected and whole; they all revolve around a passion for cinema.
An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com
Hello Sarah and welcome to WomenCinemakers: we would like to start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and after having earned your B.A. in
Film from the University of British Columbia, you moved to Paris to nurture your education with an M.A. of Film and a M.F.A. of New Media and Contemporary Art, that you received from the Paris VIII UniversitĂŠ De Saint Denis. Moreover, you are currently pursuing your PhD in the Interdisciplinary studies program at UBC: how did these experiences influence your evolution as an