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

b/w+Col (DCP) sound 28min

PREMIERE:    Experimental Film Festival Frankfurt

Best Experimental Film, Toronto Women Film Festival, March 2024.

9. September 2023

Double Exposure re-stages photographs of Pucill and her once partner Sandra Lahire, shortly before Sandra’s death from anorexia in 2001.   These black and white photographic images are projected onto an interior wall, where the filmmaker steps inside.  Alone with the camera, the filmmaker blindly positions herself into a place that she cannot see, to re-play the image, to meet herself then and Sandra, who both keep getting younger.  ‘Double Exposure’ is a space created between two time-frames, between two women and between material and light as odd objects from the projections are placed in position with their ‘light projection’ double eg a dress, shoe, mirror, table, chair etc.  Inside this imagined intimacy that is also empty, the silence in the room is interrupted with street sounds from the world outside.  The monochrome static camera and slow-paced performance of unbroken time that constitutes the body of the film, is bookended with colour 16mm film of a sunny beach, where colour emulsion bleeds between the sea, sky and sun and Sandra dances spontaneously whilst chatting and joking with the filmmaker who is present at that time, soon after, and 21 years after the death.  Sandra’s piano playing ‘Prelude in E minor’ by Chopin accompanies her spinning dance and puppet performance on the beach.  Lines from a text Sandra was writing at the time the photographs were made, are read over the images by the filmmaker that include quotations from the painter Georgio de Chirico and poet Sylvia Plath, reflecting on enigma, love, camera memory and a body that cannot be heard.

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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

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Frankfurt Experimental Film Festival Premiere 9 Sept 2023

Danielle Arnaud Gallery, Discussion with Helena Reckitt + Filmmaker. May 31st 2024

Toronto International Women Film Festival Best Experimental Film 2024

Experimental Brasil 2024: Official Selection

Experimental Forum Los Angeles 2024: Special Mention

Buenos Aries Independent Film Festival 2024: Official Selection

FilmHaus, Berlin  2024::Semi Finalist

Screener Short Films 2023:  Honourable Mention

Montreal Women Film Festival: 2023 Nominee

Experimental Brazil Selected

Montreal Independent Film Festival Selected

Chicago Women Film Festival Selected

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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.

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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

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London Film Festival Premiere: 14 October 2021-Official Selection

Jeu de Paume, Paris, November 2021  In  Vivienne Dick Retrospective

‘Danielle Arnaud Gallery.    Screening and discussion with Helen de Witt, 123 Kennington Road, London.   Decemaber 2022.

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

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