Private Project

August/September Rain

A subjective map of Berlin, a journal of sensory impressions of intimacy. August/September Rain takes us through the city via a hand-drawn map. This and nature's spokes-elements - the cycle of days and a river to cross, are our framework for entering into a personal experiencing of this place and the encounters made within it.

  • Flora Cullerne Bown
    Director
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Documentary, Experimental, Music Video, Short, Student
  • Genres:
    poetic, personal, experimental, artists' film
  • Runtime:
    14 minutes 55 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    January 11, 2024
  • Country of Origin:
    United Kingdom
  • Country of Filming:
    Germany
  • Language:
    English
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    Yes - Goldsmiths University
Director Biography - Flora Cullerne Bown

As a filmmaker, I'm intrigued by the myriad ways we can relate to our surroundings; public or intimate, urban or rural. My work engages with personal experiences of place rooted in the sensory and poetic. These concerns are reflected in my film-making methods - I incorporate different mediums such as writing, sewing, drawing and animation within my films, in a DIY fashion, using what is close at hand, as well as attempting an embodied use of the camera through improvisation.

As well as films, I work with installations and workshops. Over Summer 2023 I delivered a series of Improvisational Filmmaking workshops along the River Thames in London at low tide, where participants probed their relationship to the site through simultaneous engagement of camera and senses. The resulting collaborative film 'How far is the distance between us?' was exhibited at Goldsmiths 2023 Degree Show, where I studied a Graduate Diploma in Art.

Prior to this I was living in Berlin, where I did a short course in Experimental Filmmaking at MetFilm School, run by Nina Könnemann. My time there was the seed of my film ‘August/September Rain’, a subjective map of the city. The first iteration of it was exhibited in the show 'Internal Kaleidoscope: Urban Fragments' at IMT Gallery, London in November 2022.

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Director Statement

Can we experience the warmth of an encounter through abstract representation? Can the sensory qualities of a memory translate in film to a viewer? Can a cityscape feel intimate? These are some of the questions August/September Rain sets out to explore.

After I moved back to London from Berlin, certain moments remained at the top of my memory pool of the city, although I was unsure why. Amongst these were encounters with music and strangers and spokes-elements of nature. These instances were all clustered within the months of August and September 2021, and most involved rain. In hope of finding more resonances between these moments and a way to weave a narrative, I drew their locations out on paper, thus producing a personal psycho-geographic map of the place.

The textural, layered style of the film is partly a product of having little recorded material of each memory to work with (for one I had a sound recording, another some footage and others, nothing), but I hope it also speaks to the felt qualities of experience - the emotions and sensory impressions which mingle in our memory and are hard to describe in literal imagery or words.

I hope the viewer, despite missing actual recordings of some memories, may feel immersed in this time and place we explore, and might also be left with some impression of an urban life full of connections rather than separations - connections with ourselves and each other, our senses, the cosmos - some kind of outer intimacy.