How I Buried My Mother

Marina Lutz is the writer, producer, director, and editor of the award-winning documentary short The Marina Experiment that had its USA television premiere on The Documentary Channel in 2010. Praised by the highly regarded French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema as “…eighteen extraordinary and exciting minutes…rarely has found footage revealed so many intimate issues,” they compared her film to Yoko Ono’s Rape and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom.
Spain’s most important cinematic event, the Donostia-San Sebastián International Film Festival, invited The Marina Experiment to screen as part of their thematic retrospective of contemporary non-fiction cinema, where it was in the company of films by Werner Herzog and Lars von Trier. This festival is among the four most important film festivals in the world alongside Cannes, Berlin, and Venice. The Marina Experiment has been featured at more than 35 film festivals worldwide, from the high-profile Mill Valley Film Festival, which has an impressive track record for launching the careers of new filmmakers, to the alternative Melbourne Underground Film Festival, which supports filmmakers who operate outside established film industry infrastructures. The film has been included in various festivals that promote the importance of the contribution of women in the development of audiovisual creation, as well as several international human rights film festivals. The Marina Experiment has garnered eight awards so far, including Best Documentary, Best Short Film and Best Screenplay.
After The Marina Experiment was nominated as an official selection in the LAB competition of the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, the largest and most prestigious short film festival in the world, Marina found herself with a premiere theatrical screening at Forum des Images in Paris. The Marina Experiment was invited back to Clermont-Ferrand in 2011 for the 10th anniversary of the LAB competition, where it screened in both Clermont-Ferrand and Valence, France. In Spring 2011, The Marina Experiment was shown theatrically by Cinéma Apollo in Châteauroux, France as part of a highlighted program using film archives to explore the concept of memory through the film medium.
The Marina Experiment was included in a group show at the Wimbledon College of Art, which has a long and distinguished history as one of London’s major art institutions. The film has distracted passersby as a window installation at the Chair and the Maiden gallery in New York and appeared at Tabakalera in San Sebastian, Spain, an International Contemporary Culture Centre specialized in visual arts. The Death Be Kind gallery in Melbourne, Australia published stills from the The Marina Experiment accompanied by Marina’s writing in The Memorial, a catalogue of texts that captures the personal meaning behind the objects we inherit from the deceased and how these material possessions remain important in memory-making.
Marina has accompanied The Marina Experiment to several universities including The Sorbonne where she spoke to the film students about her creative process; the film screened there again as part of a lecture that examined the psychology of perversion. The Marina Experiment was shown at The Center for Neural Science at NYU, for a lab whose work is focused on how traumatic memories are formed, stored, and retrieved and Marina spoke at Bryn Mawr for a course entitled “Identification in the Cinema,” about the ways that the self is defined in and through images.