Encounters in the Third Phase – A short-film programme at She Makes Noise

All three shorts portray encounters between women: a scientist living in extreme conditions with her psychologist; a young woman who shares her life with her grandmother; and two filmmakers who focus on the figure of Wendy Carlos. They all offer glimpses of alternative ways of living and understanding the world.

The Antarctic Gardener, by Elisa Strinna. The Netherlands / Italy. 2022. 24 min. Spanish premiere

A speculative piece of fiction about the generation of the artificial ecosystems that will be necessary for survival in the near future, told through a story of confinement and human and plant survival in the extreme environment of Antarctica.

The Antarctic gardener is a scientist working in a greenhouse at the South Pole, making life grow where none should exist. The serenity inside the containers she inhabits and cultivates is in contrast with the furious natural forces unleashed outside. The film, which had its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2023, examines the relationships between nature and technology, exploring their consequences and their limits.

Elisa Strinna (Italy, 1982) is an Italian multimedia artist. She works mainly in the fields of sculpture, sound and video. She graduated in Visual Arts at IUAV (University of Venice), completing her studies with a postgraduate degree in Documents and Contemporary Art at ÉESI (École européenne supérieure de l'image) in France. She began her film career in 2011 with the short films Dust and The Apple Girl. The Antarctic Gardener is her latest film to date. Some of the museums and art centres that have exhibited Strinna’s work include: Culturgest (Lisbon and Porto, Portugal); the Taipei Biennial (China); the MACRO Museum and the MART Museum (Italy); and the Espai d’art contemporani de Castelló (Spain).

My Friends Are the Birds..., by Vitória Monteiro. Austria / Brazil. 2023. 15 min. International premiere.

Drawing on Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, the filmmaker’s encounter with her grandmother serves as a starting point to reflect on the importance of finding a community – from one’s own family to social collectives and online networks – to share life and experiences with, and face common struggles without fear of being utopian.

Several meetings of Vitória Monteiro with Ethel Indarte, her 88-year-old Uruguayan grandmother, bring to light the memoirs Indarte wrote fifteen years earlier. Monteiro’s grandmother was a woman who suffered great loneliness and achieved her independence by arranging flowers. Verbalising this story for the first time becomes a cathartic element for emancipation. The film premiered at the Diagonale Film Festival in Graz, Austria.

Vitória Monteiro (Brazil, 1994) is a filmmaker, visual artist and singer. Her multidisciplinary creative interests include video, sculpture and collage. Trained in theatre at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, in 2016 she moved to Austria to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, specialising in moving image and digital art. She currently performs in different artistic and political circuits and her practice is grounded in a politically engaged, queer-feminist perspective. She has shown her work at the Venice Biennale (Austria Pavilion 2019), the Wiener Filmmuseum (Austria) and the Improper Walls Gallery.

Wendy (exhibition version), by Frances Scott and Chu-Li Shewring. United Kingdom. 2023. 35 min.

Wendy is a tribute – a kind of film-lover’s letter – to the work of pioneering electronic music composer Wendy Carlos. The short is conceived as a four-handed piano duet between two filmmakers, who together learn to play Timesteps, a transcription of Carlos’s original score for A Clockwork Orange. The soundtrack, initially composed for synthesizers, is played here on the piano, introducing a series of dissonances and rhythm breaks that give a new reading to the original theme.

The film moves through voice coders, archives, re-readings, solar eclipses, cyclical returns and collaborative learning in search of a sound synthesis that reflects a way of being. The production’s visual material combines a broad spectrum of textures ranging from handmade 16 mm film to digitally rendered 3D images. Wendy was presented in its exhibition version at the TACO! Contemporary Art Centre, in London, in the summer of this year.

Frances Scott (UK, 1981) is a visual artist working on the periphery of film production. Her films, based on processes of collaboration with specialists from other disciplines, are guided by extensive research. Scott’s projects include films as well as installations, publications and sound pieces. Her audiovisual work has been presented at festivals and art centres such as the NIFF New York, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, BFI London, CTM Berlin, the Anthology Film Archives (New York) and the Whitechapel Gallery (London).

Chu-Li Shewring (UK, 1977) is a filmmaker and sound designer. A graduate of the London College of Communication, she holds an MA in Sound Design from the National Film and Television School. In the field of sound she has collaborated with filmmakers and artists like Jeremy Deller, Beatrice Gibson, Steve McQueen, Ben Rivers and Aura Satz. Her screen work combines interviews, archive and documentary footage with delicately crafted soundscapes to create realities that lie somewhere between reality and fiction. Shewring’s films have been featured at festivals such as Rotterdam, the Sheffield DocFest, the London Film Festival, the Edinburgh Film Festival, the Uppsala ISFF, Camerimage, Navarra Punto de Vista Festival and the Toronto Film Festival.