All posts by Sarah Pucill

Double Exposure 2023

Above: The filmmaker Sandra Lahire from 1999; film still from ‘Double Exposure’ (2023)

b/w+Col (DCP) sound 28min
PREMIERE:    exf f. – days of experimental cinema frankfurt
9. September 2023

Double Exposure re-stages photographs of Pucill and her once partner, filmmaker Sandra Lahire that were made collaboratively shortly before Lahire’s death from anorexia in 2001.   Set inside an otherwise quiet studio, black and white interior scenarios are played out with picture frames, chairs, and a dining table, whilst street sounds from outside are heard as the filmmaker re- positions her body inside the celluloid projections of herself and Lahire.  These inner walls of photographs from another time, are re-lived through posed living tableaux as if in stilled time.  Still and moving merge also with out-takes from a film made soon after Lahire’s death.  Contrasting this, the start and end, that bookend the film, show an open space of 16mm film that bleeds colour over a sea, sky and sun, as well as a half collapsed pier in Brighton from the 2001 fire.  In a further layer, Pucill voices quotes from a text Lahire was writing at the time the photos were made.  Quotes from the painter Georgio de Chirico’s and poet Sylvia Plath’s reflect on aesthetics, love, memory, camera and psyche and the politics of a feminist queer body.

[tab name=”Credits”]

Director, camera, sound:
Sarah Pucill
Appearing:
Sandra Lahire (on beach) (1950-2001), Sarah Pucill in her studio
Voice-over:
Sarah Pucill
Text:
Quotes taken from Sandra Lahire’s incomplete PhD draft
Photographs:
Sarah Pucill (copyright) in collaboration with Sandra Lahire
Piano:
Sandra Lahire on London Filmmakers Co-Op piano (Chopin Prelude in E minor, Op 28 No 4)
Colour grading and image correction:
Fraser Watson
Sound Mix:
Robbie McKane

[/tab]

[tab name=”texts”]

[/tab]

[tab name=”Screenings”]

[/tab]

[tab name=”Photos”]

[/tab]

[end_tabset]

Eye Cut, 2021

16mm col, 20min, 2021:  14 October 2021 

The film’s protagonist is a masked woman in a nude bodysuit, who wears a cardboard box that doubles as a theatre stage. The woman takes us on a surrealist journey in which she performs to an invisible applauding audience. Having passed through red curtains writhing on her back, she arrives on stage bearing a cake on her front. Hand-held cardboard puppets, that she makes from magazine cut-outs of faceless men, go on to take part in an ominous party scene around the cake, candle-lit and spinning. The audience see the woman in disguise, her eyes peeping through cut out eye holes of a man’s cardboard face, as if taking his place. She changes her mask and its gender throughout, sometimes wearing two. Flipping the card puppet-figures, she reveals on the backside, half formed sentences. These morse code- like hand-arm movements struggle to communicate something of the underside of the puppets’ pleasure.

Moving from the abstract to the overt, the film sets up a dialogue between an interior experience of a sensory landscape with the outside world, where the privacy of the body is made uncomfortably public.   Eye Cut is an experiment of what can and cannot be enunciated before we are taken to the final ‘stage’ scene, where cut out text from the MeToo movement projects as a backcloth in a domestic space as she tries to eat.

 

[tab name=”Credits”]

Performer:
Laura Matilde Mannino
Camera+edit:
Sarah Pucill
Sound Consultant:
Mairead McClean
Rushes Grade:
Fraser Watson
Sound Mix+On-line Edit:
Konrad Welz
Directed+Produced:
Sarah Pucill

[/tab]
[tab name=”texts”]

[/tab]
[tab name=”Screenings”]

London Film Festival Premiere: 14 October 2021-Official Selection
Jeu de Paume, Paris, November 2021  In  Vivienne Dick Retrospective
‘Feel The Reel’ Film Festival, Glasgow, November 2021-Nominee
Toronto International Women Film Festival, February 2022 – Best Experimental Film 2022
Dunbo Film Festival, US – Semi Finalist , February 2022
Paris Short Film Festival 2022 – Official Selection – 13-28 March 2022
Berlin International Art Film Festival 2022 -Official Selection – March-April 2022
Film Only Film Festival, Toronto, Official Selection March 2022
Montreal International Independent Film Festival- Official Selection April 2022
London New Wave Film Festival – Best Experimental Film, May 2022
Berlin Shorts Award, Semi Finalist, May 2022
New Filmmakers New Orleans, Semi Finalist, May 2022
‘Currents New Media’ Festival, Santa Fe, Exhibition Festival, June 24-26
New Jersey Shorts Awards, Semi Finalist, June 2022
Rotterdam Independent Film Festival, Semi Finalist, July 2022
Paris Women Festival, Semi Finalist August 2022
Milan Arthouse Film Awards, Semi Finalist August 2022
Munich Short Film Awards, Sei Finalist August 2022

 

[/tab]
[tab name=”Photos”]

 

[/tab]
[end_tabset]

Screening of Magic Mirror at St Brelades’s Church Hall, Jersey

Organised by LIBERATE, the screening will commence at 7.30pm at St Brelades Church,

followed by a visit to Claude Cahun’s garden.

Screening at 8pm.

Q+A with Vic Tanner Davy from Liberate Group and founder of Trans Jersey (supporting the LGBTQ communities across the Channel Islands).

Magic Mirror – Series 2013

 

Hand Mirror Photo Collage 01
2013
Photographic Print from Negative

 

 

 

The Devil  01
2013
Photographic Print from Negative

 

 

 

The Devil 02
2013
Photographic Print from Negative

 

 

 

Chess Game
2013
Photographic Print from Negative

 

 

 

2013

Blue Beard’s Wife Split

FIlm Still

 

 

 

 

Mannequin and Myself
2013
Photographic Print from Negative

 

 

 

 

Doll Seated
2013
Photographic Print from Negative

 

 

 

 

White Satin

Pose With Mask
2013
Photographic Print from Negative

 

 

 

 

Hand Mirror Photo Collage 03
2013
Photographic Print from Negative

 

 

 

Narcissus
2013
Photographic Print from Negative

 

 

 

 

Card Player


Card Player

2013
Photographic Print from Negative