Liza Babenko inspects crime on the Crimean Peninsula through art

The Ukrainian film director Liza Babenko (b. 1988) will prepare in the residency her experimental short film 36 Scenes Or Their Traces. The film is based on autobiographical events seen from the perspective of art studies.

The project is titled 36 Scenes Or Their Traces. It is experimental short film based on a biography of the author and made in a video essay genre. The approximate running time planned as around 20 minutes. The film is  grounded on the art research in contemporary philosophy. The project as itself is a visualization of a personal story of some female protagonist in a light of what French contemporary philosopher Lyotard called “unrepresentable”. Under this philosophical category means human’s memories of some traumatic event which always remain objectively unrepresentable for (artistic) representation as well as for people’s articulation. According to the script idea, the author refers to the event of some violence act happened with the heroine a decade ago one August day in a sea-cost hotel of Koktebel, Crimea, former Ukrainian territory. 10 years later the heroine decides deliberately fall into the same reality, getting into the same August time and into the same place. She chronologically reproduces the situations and actions of that day and place there, trying to get a “victory” over the memory of that place and time. She reenacted the mentioned event of her own using such artistic approach as estrangement (according to Victor Shklovsky), by this way leading to be released from the past.

The shooting of the film will be holding in Crimea (former Ukrainian territory). My expectations for the residency period are, among some others: getting close with the Finnish independent art-film scene. I would like to get an access to a kind of film archive (experimental films, video art, independent feature films, art house films) and to watch the Finnish films of the past years as well as films made recently.  By this kind of research, I plan to get a general impression of the Finnish contemporary film scene and to get some useful notes for my own film practice. I plan this as a practitioner and as a theorist. Afterwards, it is always a chance to organize some screenings of the Finnish films in my countries (Ukraine and Russia) to make the Finnish film art more close to our audience.

LIZA BABENKO

Liza Babenko (1988, Ukraine) has been making experimental films as well as contemporary theatre plays since 2013. She has got the degree in history of arts and philosophy. For some years before film practicing she was working as an art and film critic and curator. In 2013 she directed a theatre performance in collaboration with New York based artist Anton Vidokle at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Lately she has studied film directing at the Gotland Film Lab (Sweden). She was film director’s assistant of Svetlana Baskova (Russia) and Sarunas Bartas (Lithuania-France). For now Babenko is studying at the Moscow School Of New Cinema and working on her two short feature films.