Film for Storm de Hirsch

Examines the careers of women who made a lasting contribution to film history as directors: Alice Guy Blaché, who in 1896 directed what is arguably the first plot-driven film; Ida Lupino, who also had a long career as an actor; Ruth Ann Baldwin, who directed numerous early westerns; Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's film propagandist; as well as Dorothy Davenport Reid, Lois Weber, Kathlyn Williams, Germaine Dulac, Cleo Madison and many more. Film clips, stills, and other archival materials bring their work to life.

Mass for Shut-ins. A hand-painted 16mm film. Direct animation. 8 minutes. "A fever dream. An infinitely morphing kaleidscopic stained glass window; bells that remind me of the sounds of Amsterdam, my second home after New York. Frantic REM sleep kicks in around 5 minutes..." A pandemic film made under quarantine, Spring 2020. How do we survive this pandemic? We survive through art & music.

To the eerie sound of a vintage record, colour blotches saturate the frame like moving-image stained-glass windows in Gwendolyn Audrey Foster’s Kitchen Sink Film, a short 16mm work of painterly psychedelia – handmade in the artist’s own kitchen sink.

"Dreaming in Aspect Ratio" is a hand-made diary film and experiment in disrupted stereoscopy; an adopted "found" home movie. A playful queer self-portrait in found dream memories. An experimental documentary and Surrealist détournement. Bright colours collaged with black and white imagery of the joy of female friendships evoke dreaming and reverie; a lost queer childhood regained through the magic of cinema, disrupting typical self-portraiture and auto-ethnography.