Deborah S. Phillips

The adventure of Melissa and Gustavo starts aboard a red cargo ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean. It takes them from Brazil to Berlin, a city of perpetual movement, where the old constantly has to give space to the new. The couple finds a home and transforms it into the center of their own universe. As time passes and seasons change, life and cinema become interchangeable and their apartment evolves into an ever-changing stage, where friends are invited to play their own roles and reality and fiction merge. Until one day a cosmic portal appears in their home, opening connections between the past, the present and the future.

In "Mosaïc", the Islamic and Jewish decorative and architectural motifs are based on images, drawings and photographs of intercultural places: Samarkand, Bukhara, Fez, Casablanca, Andalusia, Isfahan, Cairo, Istanbul...

Completed in 2024. 40 sec, Super 8

Short by Deborah Phillips.

After a tough time, a little bit of lightness is called for itself. A search for beauty in the world around me. (Deborah S. Phillips)

There is such a variety of places where you can find water in Berlin: sometimes, you feel like you are in the countryside, other times, it is industrial, or just full. This project has been an excuse to spend time at places where there are bodies of water, whether rivers, canals, fountains or lakes...

Loosely based on Lewis Caroll's Through the looking glass, BREAD is a series of metamorphoses. We pass through a table into a world of strange mutations: bread crumbs bounce and dance. At the end gravity wins.

Part 3 of the Bethanien Tetralogy.

Green turns red, so my colours come full circle.

Part 2 of the Bethanien Tetralogy.

A tribute to a special place – Kunstquartier Bethanien

A third of a film-book-installation project. Three times fallen, three times restarted, three legs, three ends. The story of Jewish immigration.

Close-up cinema in London asked people who have shown films there in the last years whether they wanted to make a short film for their anniversary. So I gave their name some thought, which took me to words of proximity in different languages...

This is composition reacting to a whinging zeitgeist, threatened with the possibility of war. A still-life in time, a means of having hope. The Allam house is in Esfahan was being renovated when we were there. It had been damaged during the Iran-Iraq war.

A path doesn't always go straight - everything has to go around corners....

Ruminations about the color red.

As a printmaker, the effect of sequences of prints & details thereof always seem to want to be filmed…

Reflections on the joy of being able to use a large studio to paint & to be able to film as well for a short time. Filmed in Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin-Kreuzberg.

Fragments and impressions of urban debris come alive through playful stop-motion and superimpositions. Scraps, ribbons, caps, paper, plastic, cans and objects beyond identification lie scattered beneath the bridges and along the streets. A multi-lingual meditation on the poetry of waste.

«71» is guided by impressions and feelings of an artist during shooting: a feeling of absurdity that comes when one travels to the back of beyond without ever reaching anywhere.

Part 1 of the Bethanien Tetralogy.

Deborah S. Phillips Super 8, stumm, 2005 2:30 min.

My mother, Carol Frieda Herman P. Hirsch, Chaya bas Moshe ve Yehudit, died on June 23, 2022, at home, the way she wanted her last weeks to be. Self-determined, surrounded by majestic trees outside the windows, with birds chirping in the background. With her books in shelves nearby. Even when she lacked the energy to read, she was glad to have those books near her. And she enjoyed the smells of good food, her music and other simple things as long as it was possible. The choice to use film material that was way past its sell-by date corresponds with how, as one approaches the end of one’s life, things fall apart, gradually. A tribute.

After 13 years of artistic research into the 3 colours of light (which started with CAPSICUM), this film (also made a handmade book) looks into the colour that is, bascially, life - green.