Nominated for this year’s Jarman Award Beatrice Gibson considers the state of a world in flux through the lens of motherhood and femininity in I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead, a cinematic love letter to her new-born daughter. Meanwhile, Two Sisters, an abstract crime thriller, follows the story of two pregnancies, a beauty queen and a missing poodle in Paris as fears of the world collapsing prevail.
Programme
Beatrice Gibson: I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead (2018, 20 mins)
By turns raucous and reserved, I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead ponders the future of a world in flux. Written as a love letter to Gibson’s daughter, the film uses poetry as a means to reckon with the present, featuring readings by radical poets CAConrad and Eileen Myles, excerpts from work by Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, and music by Pauline Oliveiros.
Beatrice Gibson: Deux sœurs qui ne sont pas sœurs (Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters) (2019, 21 mins)
Two sisters (who are not sisters), two pregnancies, a two-seater car, a beauty queen, a poodle. The election of a second fascist – this time in Brazil. A crime thriller without a crime, Deux Soeurs unfolds like a dream.
Based on an original screenplay by Gertrude Stein, written in 1929 as European fascism was gaining momentum, Deux Soeurs is set in contemporary Paris in a moment of comparable social and political unrest. Casting an intimate network of the director’s friends and influences as its principle actors, from renowned New York School poet Alice Notley to educator Diocouda Diaoune and playing on Stein’s interest in autobiography and repetition, Deux Souers is simultaneously an abstract thriller and a collective portrait. An exploration of inheritance, responsibility, ethics and futurity. Deux Souers was shot by friend and collaborator Ben Rivers and features an original soundtrack by British composer Laurence Crane.