Taking its title from the poem by Wallace Stevens, the film is composed of a series of attempts at looking and being looked at. Beginning as a city state commission under the name and attitude of “Unschool”, the film became a kaleidoscope of the experiences, questions and wonders of a couple of high school students after a year of experiences with filmmaker Ana Vaz questioning what cinema can be. Here, the camera becomes an instrument of inquiry, a pencil, a song.
Based on Gertrude Stein’s eponymously named screenplay, written in 1929 as European fascism was building momentum. Beatrice Gibson’s adaptation, set almost a century later in contemporary Paris, deploys Stein’s script as a talismanic guide through a contemporary moment of comparable social and political unrest. An original soundtrack, written especially for the film by British composer Laurence Crane, responds to the repetition, duplication and duality at play in Stein’s script. Both a fictional thriller and an act of collective representation, Deux Soeurs proposes empathy and friendship as means to reckon with an increasingly turbulent present.
A meditation and a reverie upon a city at once real and imagined. Conceptualized as a documentary on the ZUP buildings in France, the film has instead found form as poetic & expansive confrontation with the psychogeography of a contemporary Europe in crisis. A requiem for a city dreamt between its past and present.
Sacris Pulso departs from the dismemberment of another film, "Brasiliários". This film is an interpretation of Clarice Lispector's chronic "Brasília", her vision of the modernist capital, as it is the film which marks the encounter of my mother, playing Lispector, and my father, composer of the film's sound score. Through the juxtaposition of "Brasiliários" with a series of reassembled found footage, the film takes the form of a voyage of remembrance and imagination, of a past and future time dreamt between personal and collected materials, between memory and fiction.
Ana Vaz (b. 1986, Brasília) is an artist and filmmaker whose films and other expanded works speculate upon the relationships between self and other, myth and history through a cosmology of signs, references and perspectives. Assemblages of found and shot materials, her films combine ethnography and speculation in exploring the frictions and fictions imprinted upon both cultivated and savage environments and their multiple inhabitants. A graduate from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains, Ana was also a member of SPEAP (SciencesPo School of Political Arts), a project conceived and directed by Bruno Latour. Recent screenings of her work include the New York Film Festival – Projections, TIFF Wavelenghts, CPH:DOX, Videobrasil, Courtisane, Cinéma du Réel and Lux Salon. In 2015, she was the recipient of the Kazuko Trust Award presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in recognition of artistic excellence and innovation in her moving-image work. Ana is also a founding member of the collective "Coyote" along with Tristan Bera, Nuno da Luz, Elida Hoëg and Clémence Seurat, a cross-disciplinary group working in the fields of ecology, anthropology, ethnology and political science through an array of crosscutting platforms. Her films are distributed by Light Cone & the Canadian Filmmaker Distribution Centre.
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