Poem
An unseen teacher becomes frustrated as they try to teach a poem to a stuffed toy.
Writer
1908, Paris. Over three fever-dream nights in the Hotel Biron, poet Rainer Maria Rilke encounters the ghost of his good friend, artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, who died shortly after giving birth to her first child. In response to this haunting, Rilke writes his epic prose lament, "Requiem for a Friend", as a tribute to Paula and to women torn between choosing a life sacrificed to Art or to Motherhood. One hundred years later, three women - a painter, an actress and a dancer - and a theatre director prepare to stage Rilke's "Requiem" in Berkeley California as abstract performance ritual.
Writer
Ana combines straight-on documentary technique with unexpected flights of dreamlike surrealism. The title character, played by Ana Maria Martins Guerra, is a young Portuguese girl who lives with her grandmother. Through their relationship, we are witness to the Cycle of Life: Grandmother takes care of granddaughter until granddaughter is obliged to do same for grandmother. The scenes between the two protagonists are counterpointed with impressionistic camera compositions based upon famous religious paintings. Ana was impressive enough to earn an American art-house release, a rarity for independently produced Portuguese films.
Screenplay
This is an experimental film featuring an allegorical audiovisual symphony of image, text (excerpts from works by Proust and verses from Rilke’s poetry) and music through the use of archival photographs taken from Illustration Magazine. It focuses on the urban establishment and links the wave of Western colonization to the period right before the Great War (1914-1918).
