Private Project

life is delicate and beautiful

Fleeting moments are captured on a personal camera-phone over the course of a year: from a riot of sparkles inside a beer glass on Christmas Eve, to a landscape of post-festival carnage as the sun is setting. These combine with a subtitled narration, becoming a film poem to the beauty and fragility found in everyday life.

  • Flora Cullerne Bown
    Director
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short, Student
  • Genres:
    experimental, short, videopoem, student
  • Runtime:
    2 minutes 15 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    June 1, 2022
  • Country of Origin:
    United Kingdom
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    Yes - Goldsmiths University
Director Biography - Flora Cullerne Bown

As a filmmaker, Flora Cullerne Bown (b.1996, London) is intrigued by the myriad ways we can relate to our surroundings; public or intimate, urban or rural. Her work engages specifically with personal experiences of place rooted in the sensory and poetic. These concerns are reflected in her film-making methods - often incorporating diverse mediums such as writing, sewing, drawing and animation within her films, favouring a DIY approach by using what is close at hand, as well as approaching an embodied use of the camera through improvisation.

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

Prior to this Flora was based in Berlin, where she completed studies in Experimental Filmmaking at MetFilm School, learning from filmmakers Nina Könnemann and Dagie Brundert. Her time there became the seed for her film ‘August/September rain’, a subjective mapping of the city, which was exhibited in the group show 'Internal Kaleidoscope: Urban Fragments' at IMT Gallery, London in November 2022.

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Director Statement

A hungover musing where I did indeed (as the film describes) wash a spider down the drain and feel as if my heart could break, gave way to this film. At first I was interested in this phenomenon - how the hungover brain sees life as teetering on an edge, unsteady and poignant, but when I began writing the text extended out to become something wider, remembering moments of a similar sensitivity in sober life.

When I looked through my personal archive of footage, which is often how I begin mind mapping for a film, I realised that this feeling of being touched or moved is often why I feel called to document. So it came naturally to select moments of this sentiment I have lived, from my phone videos and combine them with the text, creating an everyday but I hope also intimate feel. It’s a simple film, but I hope it might touch somebody and bring into a keener awareness, even if momentarily, the beauty in everyday life which we often miss living in this whirlwind of modernity.