ENGLISH

FILMING THE LANDSCAPE?
International Residence for Cinema Research
From November 28th to December 11th 2011
Sete Cidades, S. Miguel (Azores, Portugal)


Presentation
“Filming the landscape?” will be the central question and the triggering concept for the creation processes based on cinematogrphic language that we intend to explore in this residence. Filming the landscape is always filming oneself, filming oneself through the landscape, searching in the world for echoes that mirror who we are. Filming the landscape will always be the affirmation of a point of view from which the vision of the world is organized and in it the relation between the one who sees and the world that is seen and lived. Filming the landscape is understood here as a prime gesture, for it represents our connection with what surrounds us, our way of being in the world. In this impetus, there are some essential cinematographical questions that appear: to discover and being discovered through the place from where you choose to see and film, to establish a fair distance with what you film, to decide or to feel the desire to wander, to walk, to move through space, or on the contrary, to build its dimensions from a fixed point, creating relations, fragile and constantly changing, between the background and the figure that is sculpted in it. All these are main questions that go through the aesthetics of documentary. Questions found in its genesis, that can easily pass unnoticed in finished works, but are in fact primordial for a veracious communication of what you really want to say with the film, its deeper truth.
In this residence that we propose, the landscape is in its center, precisely because it allows us to fix, stable, go deeper, search again and find, in this same questions, the basis, the ways and even the breaches of our own views. In S. Miguel this process will be extremely intense. Here, the relation with the landscape is strong and it is the main element of the daily life experience, the one through all the rest is nominated and organized, being capable of changing the day and drag our thoughts. Dragging this force into the creative process and try to create from it is our proposal.

Goals

At the origin of this project is the challenge of joining filmmakers from different places in S. Miguel and propose them to work from this simple and initial question: Filming the landscape? The idea is to form a work group of people living together for 2 weeks immersed in the landscape from which they will work. We are not concerned about achieving finished objects but to produce filmic notes, as in those small notebooks where we write thoughts, sudden ideas, quotes, lists, drawings, etc, those notebooks where we strive to capture and keep the memory of our encounter with the world. Believing that this process can be at the origin of the creative act we propose in this residence that each director develops is own form of relation to the landscape where he is living and tries a way of representing it through images and sounds. More than that, we ask each one to open his creative process to the participation of the others and to expose the bowels of his work, of his thinking and practice, making that opening the center of the work, sharing the doubts, the intuitions, the emptiness, the discovers, the crisis, ultimately everything that makes up creation and that is usually lived in a solitary and silent way. So, each participant will develop a possibility of work from his or hers relation with the landscape they are living in, leaning in the help of the work group to make it possible, to explore and interpret it.

The work group
The work group will be composed of 6 participants and the direction team of the residence. These people will live together in a house placed in the landscape from which they'll work - in Sete Cidades, S. Miguel (Azores, Portugal).

Calendar
28th November to the 11th December of 2011
The residence will last 2 weeks with intense work rhythm - we seek for a collective dip!

Dynamics
The dynamics of the residence will be set regarding the projects of each one. There will be screenings and discussion of films and other kind of references, moments to expose and discuss the individual projects, moments of shooting as well as screening and discussion of the rushes. The shooting/editing will advance in parallel with the writing and the discussion of ideas from the beginning of the residence. The whole will be lived intensively, without breaks, during 2 weeks.

Requirements

This residence addresses to creators with some work developed in the realm of the audiovisual media, essentially in documentary filmmaking, but not exclusively, and that are interested in working from their own relation to the real and the landscape in particular.
Each participant shall be independent in terms of equipment, from the capture of images and sounds to the editing each one must control, be familiar and confortable with his or hers own equipment. Pro equipment is not required!

Expenses

The participation in the residence is free. The organization provides room and board (the meals will be prepared by everyone in the common kitchen of the house). The organization will also try to gather a fund to pay part of the travel expenses according to the provenance of each participant.

Coordination Team
Directors: Marta Andreu and Tiago Hespanha
Assistance to direction: Frederico lobo
Producer: Tiago Melo Bento
Production: Corredor Cultural Association

----

APPLICATION REQUIRED DOCUMENTS

- What drives you to focus your gaze on the landscape? What is your connection to the act of filming the nature? What role it plays in your filmic research?
We ask you a brief text in which you share your thoughts on this filmic relationship with the landscape, with the context, with the world, with nature, with what is often settled at the bottom of what we film. It may be a reflection on your own research as filmmaker, can be motivation notes, can be thoughts as a viewer of the films of others... but also as readers, thoughts brought before a painting, linked to a sound, arising from a memory ... A text where arises that first question that we allways have to ask at the beginning, "the self facing the world", crossed by a first attempt, on paper, of materialization of feelings about this world, pointing the way you want to travel to achieve a form of expressing it on film.

- Self-biography with short reference to early works.
- CV
- DVD, CD or internet link with early works (option)
- Registration form


All the documents must be sent by mail: corredorass[at]gmail.com
Deadline for submission: 9th October
Announcement of the selection: 30th October