Ira A. Goryainova

Regarding Faustine

A short poetic essay depicting a young girl, Faustine, explores the relationship between the director and the protagonist and how the film camera, as a silent, omnipresent mediator, defines it. With a certain amount of self-reflection, the film understands documentary film as a medium that has a dominant power over the subjects it captures by locking their souls and likenesses forever into the cinematic image.

Bile

"How thin is the human skin? What does it hide behind? The leather bag of apocalypse." Bile is an introspective essay on the notion of the human body as a political metaphor. Layer-by-layer the film digs down in order to reach answers to the proposed questions: what is body, what is illness and finally what is death. A journey through the history of medical imaging and a reflection on the recent death of the director's mother in the decorations of post-Soviet Russia. Getting under the skin of the viewer, the film attempts to comprehend the complex subject of corporeality. The title Bile refers to the physical and mental conditions of the human being. In fact, black bile comes from the old Greek for melancholy: melas cholè.

Bile

"How thin is the human skin? What does it hide behind? The leather bag of apocalypse." Bile is an introspective essay on the notion of the human body as a political metaphor. Layer-by-layer the film digs down in order to reach answers to the proposed questions: what is body, what is illness and finally what is death. A journey through the history of medical imaging and a reflection on the recent death of the director's mother in the decorations of post-Soviet Russia. Getting under the skin of the viewer, the film attempts to comprehend the complex subject of corporeality. The title Bile refers to the physical and mental conditions of the human being. In fact, black bile comes from the old Greek for melancholy: melas cholè.

The Ruins of Europe

“I was Hamlet. I stood on the coast and spoke with the surf BLABLA. At my back, the ruins of Europe.” In free dive, in the manner of the Ophelia/Electra of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine (1977) which accompanies the story plot, we set out into the ruins of a Europe set adrift. Guided by Faustine du Couvent, a young Parisian woman with a dark and poetic energy, The Ruins of Europe is an eminently personal object that unfurls nervously, with the aid of archive television images, in order to draw the portrait of a society that is falling apart.