Allison Beda, Stephen Rose

Madeleine (I am not)

1 min

#film

Canada

Madeleine (I Am Not) is a playfully punk dance film poem about identity, connection and their absence. The film takes its starting point from Madeline, a poem by Romanian poet Gherasim Luca, while also playing with the question of who the woman described in it actually is. She is a dancer who is not a dancer. A choreography that never happened. A document of an event that took place live on the street—and at the same time did not.

Moving between poetry, dance and documentary, Madeleine (I Am Not) continually slips away from its own identity. The portrait of one woman becomes another woman’s self-portrait, while a real event becomes something that is repeatedly established and undone. The film loops endlessly, as if identity itself were caught in the repetition of the same question: who am I if I am not me?

1 minute of not quite yourself.

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bio

Allison Beda is an experimental filmmaker, conceptual sculptor and curator whose practice lies at the intersection of film, performance, visual art and Dadaist humour. Her films are deeply personal, darkly comic and subversively feminist, while her installations and conceptual sculptures play with questions of what art is and who gets to decide what constitutes it. She is particularly drawn to playful guerrilla art interventions and to transforming difficult life experiences into comic artistic situations.

She is the founder and curator of Fake gALLeRY and the creator of DADA tiny ART SHOW + WORLD TOUR, a biennial exhibition of miniature works by more than 40 international artists who are often underrepresented within traditional art systems. The exhibition travels internationally, sometimes taking the form of a portable gallery concealed in a coat. Through her work, Beda explores new models of exhibition-making that bypass traditional gatekeepers and encourage artists to help one another bring their work to audiences.

As a filmmaker and director of photography, her work has been presented at festivals, cinemas, on television, in galleries, on billboards and in public spaces, as well as at the Olympic Games. She is the founder and Creative Director of A Muse Productions Inc., a production company focused on films about women who make trouble and film art that defies easy categorisation. 

credits

Film Allison Beda, Stephen Rose

Poem Gherasim Luca

Translation Michael Tweed

Literary editor Bertrand Fillaudeau, Éditions Corti

Woman who is not Madeline, producer and director Allison Beda

Director of photography, editing and music Stephen Rose

Dialog recording Niko Friesen

Sound mix Rori Wenth

 

Guest screening production En–Knap Productions

In collaboration with Moovy Tanzfilmfestival