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- You are here: Home > HERE AND THERE
You are here
Online -
Thursday, November 26, 2020 - 19:00
Written by:
Melisa Liebenthal
Cinematography:
Hélène Motteau
Editing:
Florencia Gómez García
Sound:
Clément Decaudin
Producer:
Guylaine Huet
Production:
Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains
Though an enquiry that is both personal and theoretical, MELISA LIEBENTHAL maps out her own past and present, as well as her family’s history through the usage of utilitarian images, such as Google Maps and aerial photos, whose limits she tries to transgress. Having a complex family background - a grandparent who migrated from a Germany that couldn’t accept his Jewish heritage, who arrives in China, where he gets married, and then leaves for South America again due to ethnic discrimination - Liebenthal gathers all these intimate histories, strongly tied to the political context of the 20th century and brings them together in a meta-cinematographic piece. Through HERE AND THERE, she traces a geographical space of the personal, keeping herself close, both physically - by using a voice-over and some spectaculous appearances in the images themselves - and emotionally, throughout the entire process. (Emil Vasilache, BIEFF 2020)
Director:
MELISA LIEBENTHAL (b. 1991 in Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a film director and editor, graduate of Universidad del Cine in Argentina, Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión in Cuba, and Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains in France, from where she graduated with honors. In her work, Melisa Liebenthal seeks to intertwine the fields of essay-film and fiction narrative, through stories that come to play with a reflection on image, identity, and the gaze of others. Her films have been awarded in IFFR, BAFICI, Punto de Vista, and Queer Lisboa and screened in festivals such as Torino, Edinburgh, NYFF, and Oberhausen, amongst others.
Contact:
Natalia Trebik
Festivals, awards:
Jurys Special Mention - Punto de Vista 2020 / Best Film - Panorama 21 le Fresnoy 2019 / Oberhausen International Short Film Festival 2020 / International Film Festival Rotterdam 2020
“After leaving my hometown, Buenos Aires, if I ask myself where my home is, the answer is not evident anymore. I wanted to translate this feeling of indetermination by connecting it to the intricate migration story of my family and by questioning the transparency of the photographic image. I feel Google Earth, with its replica of the world through satellite photographic images, appeals to our dreams and imagination. We can travel to remote and unknown places or revisit the places of our memory, with the effect at all times of being there, where the cursor of our computer is located. However, when we descend with Street View to the street of our childhood, the experience of being there is unrecoverable. These new technological images give us the impression of returning a crystalline and direct reflection of the world, but they are opaque and impersonal.” (MELISA LIEBENTHAL)