On the Fly Productions

In the 1950s, poet Elizabeth Bishop moved to Brazil almost by chance, where she would live for nearly fifteen years. This experience marked a major turning point in both her personal life and her creative work. Through her relationship with Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares, her correspondence, notebooks, poems, and her own recorded voice, the documentary traces the birth of an intimate bond with a country that would become one of her greatest sources of inspiration. Rejecting the linearity of a traditional biographical narrative, the film adopts a free and contemplative form that mirrors the sensibility of its subject. Letters, drafts, watercolors, photographs, archival footage, and Brazilian landscapes intertwine to compose a true sensory experience, where memories emerge in fragments, much like a poem.

A new short film by Vivian Ostrovsky remembering Chantal Akerman, beginning with their first meeting in the early 1970s. Using her own footage of Chantal Akerman, the filmmaker remembers a few moments that illustrate Chantal's personality. Forty years of friendship condensed into four minutes...

It's been a long time coming.

"Going through my mini DVs shot over the past decade, I rediscovered a forgotten night sequence of Chantal Akerman and Sonia Wieder-Atherton leaving a brasserie where we had dined together in Montparnasse. The excerpt stayed with me for a while. This prompted me to focus on Chantal’s sound work in her films and her very close collaboration with cellist, Sonia Wieder-Atherton with whom she made more than 20 films. And, since New York, Paris and Moscow were places the three of us had in common, I intertwined some of my images with hers."

A fragmented tribute to Ukranian-Brazilian novelist and fashion journalist Clarice Lispector that interrogates the idea of "in-betweenness," the intermission, a hiatus.

Exactly what it says on the tin and much much more.

"Super 8 reels of Paris catwalks I shot in 1979/1980 were supposed to become an experimental short meditation on couture culture. Its authority has unraveled some since and Deleuze’s definition of style: 'creating a foreign language in one’s own language,' encouraged me to loosen the threads of this pursuit. To ponder how fashion and style are interwoven but also influenced by individual flare and whimsy, I stitched together Coco Chanel, Courrèges, Cole Porter and Kaiser Karl with vintage film moments. Then, as now, to grasp the whole cloth of this interface involves finding, but also Losing the Thread…"