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.

 

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

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