1997, 16mm, col, sound, 20min
Swollen Stigma nourishes the fantasy of its protagonist’s inner life and proposes a lesbian imaginary which takes leap into risk and displacement. The film opens with an entranced seated woman working her fingers through a single strand of hair and proceeds to explore her lived imaginary in which desire and fear interlace. She re-visions different moments in time which are haunted by an absent lover. Like a playful fairy princess, this lover appears upside down in an armchair, hanging legs-down from the ceiling, playing dead on the floor, or eating roses; her body continuously permeates the woman’s reality. The film’s shifting points of view jump between the protagonist, fantasy spaces and her lover, making an internal world leak into what is external with the fluidity of blood into water.
[tab name=”Credits”]
- Directed and produced:
- Sarah Pucill
- Funded:
- Arts Council of England
- Camera:
- Sarah Pucill
- Second camera:
- Sandra Lahire
- Edit, Sound:
- Sarah Pucill, Sandra Lahire
- Performers:
- Sally Pucill, Rachael Gomme
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[tab name=”Screenings”]
- 1997-98
- London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
- Visibilia, lesbian film festival, Bologna, Italy
- Videolisboa- Video Art Festival, Lisbon, Portugal
- Pandemonium Moving Image Art Festival, The Lux, London
- Feminale, Cologne
- Real Gallery, New York
- Images Festival of Independent Film and Video, Toronto
- Montreal Image and Nation International Queer Film and Video Festival
- Impakt Film and Video Festival, Utrecht, Netherlands
- 2004
- Experiments in Moving Image curated by Jackie Hatfield & Steve Littman
- The Old Lumiere Cinema, London
- 2005
- Wake, London Gallery West, staged exhibition
- 2006
- Greenwich Picture House (retrospective)
- Light Reading Series, NOWHERE, curated by K Mirza and B Butler
- 2007
- Greenwich Picture House (retrospective)
- 2008
- The Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne (retrospective)
- 2009
- Mass Art Film Society, Boston (retrospectve)
Pleasure Dome, Toronto (retrospective)
Anthology Film Archives, New York (retrospective) - 2010
- Millennium Film, New York (retrospective)
Ecole Des Beaux Arts, Paris (retrospective) - 2011
- BFI Southbank (retrospective)
- 2014
- Magic Lantern, Providence, Rhode Island, US
2015 - Attaque le visible Projection No1, Screened with Phantom Rhapsody (2010) at La Mutinerie, Paris, curated by Katja Gorska
- Scottish Queer Film Festival, screening at the Glad Cafe, 17 November, Glasgow
- 2016
M-Tate Modern Screening ‘From Reel to Real: Women, Feminism and the London Film-makers Co-operative, 23-25 September
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[tab name=”Texts”]
- 2010
- The Theatre of female point of view, Gloria Morano, La Furia Umana
- 1998
- The Fairies Banquet, Sandra Lahire, Coil, Issue 7
- 1998
- Dragged, Cherry Smyth, New York, Real Gallery
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