The memories of lands

My name is Tatiana Gerasimova. I’m 30 years old and I was born in Moscow. First of all I would like to say, that to become a director wasn’t an accidental choice for me. It was a result of a long time aspiration and a clear understanding that this is something I want do in my life.

After my graduation from literature gymnasium I began to work as a journalist and joined Directing courses at The Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. There I attended lectures by such masters of cinema as Sokurov, Abdarashitov, Mindadze and others. During my studies I wrote a several stories and the one script which is recognized as one of the best in my group. My plan was to join a full-time course at the Directing faculty, but family circumstances meant that I had to keep my day job and unfortunately only daytime courses were available.

At the age of 22 I began to photograph nature with my father's old analogue camera. I was traveling a lot. My interest was to be in the wild places outside tourist destination: Iceland, Japan, Chile, Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia, Azores islands and so on. I didn’t have any ambitions at the photography, I did it for myself and only later, time to time, began to put my photographs online. With photography new things came into my life - soon I was approached by art-curators from France. In 2010-2011 I was participating in exhibitions “La nuit de la photo” in France as the only Russian photographer.

Photography gave me a reason to justify my actions in regards to film. It became my side interest, as picture making was my main concern. 2 years went by. I was interviewed by several European and American online-magazines and blogs, the “Dazed and Confused” magazine wrote about my charity photo project “THE FOREST”, where young and famous photographers shown how they perceived the wood in their childhood.

But I felt I couldn’t express my ideas fully. My ideas formed narratives, not static photographs. Either I start to make so called “video-art” or I disregard my passion for story telling and continue with photography. Both of these seemed rather fake. Thus I made a serious decision to leave professional photography and stop fooling myself.

After this decision I felt a sense of relief and emptiness. I was 26, had a lot of stories in my head and a routine job as a copywriter just for money. If I weren’t to change anything, than later it would be too late. I began to research international film schools, this way I found the 1-year Directing program in the National Film School in Lodz.

In 2013 I left my previous life behind to move to Lodz with an idea for a script to develop in my studies. During my studies I directed four etudes based on my stories (the three of them I shooted by myself) and attended master-classes and seminars. For my final school project I wrote script for a short future film “The evening of Marita” - the story of a lonely woman named Marita lived in the Portuguese village who encounters life-changing experience in a course of one evening.

In the fall of 2015 I have written the script of the short film “The memories of lands”, have raised money and have shooted it in Russia. Now I work on the promotion of this movie and look for the money and the people as a part of my art and technical crew to make the Portuguese short film “The evening of Marita”.