SIE [Elle / She]

Presented only in theatres.

This film is part of the FIFA Expérimental section.

FIFA Expérimental is an out-of-competition, by-invitation section of the festival put together by visual and media arts curator Nicole Gingras, from Montreal. This selection highlights innovative approaches to film and video from the following angles: creative processes, modes of collaboration between artists in the production of a work and the workings of memory on identity. This panorama of exploratory cinema is composed of fifteen works assembled into four programs.

Hand-drawn frame by frame from memory, SIE (She) invites the viewer to encounter a person who meets their gaze without seemingly being able to look back at them. In around 70,000 drawings made over the past 20 years, Alexander Schellow reconstructs the face of his grandmother in the course of 105 minutes. Born in 1913 in Königsberg (Germany), she died in a home for people with dementia in Berlin at the age of 102. The intertwined streams of remembering and forgetting form a space of immersive sound and image. They unfold an impossible cinematic archive — a place inhabited by disparate temporalities.
In his work Alexander Schellow deals closely with relations between space, perception and action at the junction between artistic and scientific research. Since 1999, he has been working on reconstruction processes from memory, based on an ongoing daily drawing practice, which generates various formats of drawings, animations/​films, archives, installations, readings, performances and texts.