Country: USA
Year: 2011
Duration: 34'
In a house out in the woods a mysterious family is preparing a party for some foresters visiting. Dim lights set the viewer in a disturbing sense of expectation, while the family gets the house ready following a procedure of ritual operations. The ritual looks like a silent sabbath of which the family appears to be the ancient guardian. “Over two years I rehearsed alone with each performer, building movements and character fragments, hunting and framing gestures with a video camera. I kept the performers apart in order to figure out who they could be individually, to later bring them together as a whole of isolated parts – a surrogate family of caretaker-laborers – on the edge of civilization, of an era past or perhaps future. [...] Waking Things embraces the theatrical in the everyday, landing somewhere between fantasy and hyper-reality.”
Biography
film director
Melika Bass
Melika Bass (USA) studied direction at the Saic in Chicago and participated in many prestigious resident workshops held at the Illinois Art Council in 2008, at the Ox-Bow School of the Arts and in the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2009 and at the Roger Brow House in 2011. Her work was presented in many events and shown in many galleries worldwide, among which the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, the Segal Center in Montreal and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, that dedicated to her a personal exhibition in 2011. She also won the Artadia Award, a scholarship from the Illinois Art Council and Songs from the Shed (2008) received the Kodak award for best cinematography in occasion of the Ann Arbor Festival.
FILMOGRAFIA
The Cranium (cm, 1997), Ninety-Three (cm, 2000), Holguin (cm, 2003), Asleep in the Deep (cm, 2004), Story Ever Told (cm, 2005), Bulb in the Head (cm, 2006), Songs from the Shed (cm, 2008), Shoals (mm, 2011), Waking Things (mm, 2011).
Cast
& Credits
regia, sceneggiatura, montaggio/director, screenplay, film editing
Melika Bass
fotografia/cinematography
Melika Bass, Lori Felker
scenografia, costumi/production design, costume design
Leone Anne Reeves, Carolina Gonzalez, Colin Self, Simon Allen
suono/sound
Melika Bass, Mathew Paul Jinks
interpreti/cast
Selma Banich, Mislav Cavajda, Stephen Fiehn, Matthew Goulish
produttori/producers
Melika Bass, Matthew Goulish, Lin Hixson
produzione/production
Tender Archive, Every House Has a Door
vendita all’estero/world sales
Tender Archive