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Cinema Elvire Popesco -
Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - 21:00
Cinema Muzeul Țăranului -
Saturday, March 31, 2018 - 16:30
Written by:
Dani Leventhal, Sheilah Wilson
Sound:
Bonnie Jones, Paul Hill
Producer:
Video Data Bank
Romanian Premiere
Strangely Ordinary This Devotion is a visceral exploration of feral domesticity, queer desire, and fantasy in a world under the threat of climate change. Utilizing and exploding archetypes, the film offers a radical approach to collaboration and the conception of family. Wilson and Leventhal collect and arrange images and moments that are at once peculiar and banal, precious and disturbing, creating resonance and contrast through experimental modes of storytelling. (Dani Leventhal, Sheilah Wilson)
Director:
Sheilah Wilson is currently Associate Professor Photography at Denison University. She has BFA from NSCAD University and MFA from Goldmiths College. Most recently she has been working on projects analyzing the traces between history, story and the land. She uses photography, video, and text as performative and documentary tools to pick through the seams of narrative and image.
Website:
Contact:
danileventhal[at]gmail[dot]com
Festivals, awards:
- Toronto International Film Festival 2017
- Whitney Museum of American Art New York 2017
Curatorial comment:
Strangely Ordinary This Devotion confronts constructs of the maternal through numerous imaginings of birthing, domesticity, and the guttural love that arises when a child is born. The subject of the devotion to which the title refers is WILSON and LEVENTHAL's daughter, Rose. The young family's daily life is juxtaposed with surreal imagery that calls into question the contingency of the spaces that they occupy—as women, as lesbians, as mothers—and the bodies they possess. Re-born as sensation over material, the womb is depicted as a gaping incision made across the surface of a woman's head, a gush of blood pushing through a body of water, a coil of seaweed rolled across a hardwood floor. Brakhage's Window Water Baby Moving comes to mind, but Wilson and Leventhal do not gawk at pregnancy or sink under the hand of a father figure, instead separating the mother from genitalia, genitalia from gender, gender from tradition, and tradition from form. Via the couple's television screen, the outside world is exchanged for an intimacy shaped by the self-assured androgyny of Prince's “I Would Die 4 U” (I am not a woman / I am not a man) and the amorous friction of Chantal Akerman's Je, Tu, Il, Elle. Though its many abstractions may extend beyond immediate comprehension, the film eschews the belief that clarity is honesty, that honesty must always be clear. (Kelley Dong, Mubi)
Strangely Ordinary This Devotion confronts constructs of the maternal through numerous imaginings of birthing, domesticity, and the guttural love that arises when a child is born. The subject of the devotion to which the title refers is WILSON and LEVENTHAL's daughter, Rose. The young family's daily life is juxtaposed with surreal imagery that calls into question the contingency of the spaces that they occupy—as women, as lesbians, as mothers—and the bodies they possess. Re-born as sensation over material, the womb is depicted as a gaping incision made across the surface of a woman's head, a gush of blood pushing through a body of water, a coil of seaweed rolled across a hardwood floor. Brakhage's Window Water Baby Moving comes to mind, but Wilson and Leventhal do not gawk at pregnancy or sink under the hand of a father figure, instead separating the mother from genitalia, genitalia from gender, gender from tradition, and tradition from form. Via the couple's television screen, the outside world is exchanged for an intimacy shaped by the self-assured androgyny of Prince's “I Would Die 4 U” (I am not a woman / I am not a man) and the amorous friction of Chantal Akerman's Je, Tu, Il, Elle. Though its many abstractions may extend beyond immediate comprehension, the film eschews the belief that clarity is honesty, that honesty must always be clear. (Kelley Dong, Mubi)