Interview with a Notorious Wild Cat

Interview with a Notorious Wild Cat (2022) is about an unidentified creature, a sexed hybrid of a human and lynx, an echo from Demonstration (2022). This creature was never born but died along with its mother (“the daughter”). This work considers the hybrid’s impossibility. The topic of the interview it presents is the hybrid being’s experience of its body, a female body. The experience of the body discussed sounds like that of a human female body, a body in the process of becoming or prevailing. The character speaks of a vicious cycle of difference, not identifying with this body but exploring it, fascinated and mortified, a seductive yet
shameful experience from within a volatile body.

  • Elísabet Birta Sveinsdóttir
    Director
  • Elísabet Birta Sveinsdóttir
    Writer
  • Elísabet Birta Sveinsdóttir
    Producer
  • Elísabet Birta Sveinsdóttir
    Key Cast
    "Gilda a Notorious Wild Cat"
  • Billie Meiniche
    Key Cast
    "The interviewer "
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental, Short
  • Genres:
    artist film, true crime, video installation, animality, femininity
  • Runtime:
    13 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    October 8, 2022
  • Country of Origin:
    Iceland
  • Country of Filming:
    Sweden
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    16mm
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Elísabet Birta Sveinsdóttir

Elisabet Birta (born 1991 in Reykjavík, Iceland) is an Icelandic artist and filmmaker.

She studied Contemporary Dance and Fine Art at Iceland Academy of the Arts and Malmö Art Academy, Sweden. Apart from Iceland they have exhibited work in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, Cyprus and Latvia. Their performances have been featured at Reykjavík Dance Festival, and Friends of S.M.A.K., Ghent. Sveinsdottirs films have been screened at a few festivals in Europe, the US and Canada. Including her short film The Sacred Wood, 1882 (2014) was a finalist in a competition for experimental shorts at the Arctic Heat Film Festival, Finland.

Sveinsdóttirs alluring and intimate work often reflects on femininities and animality, film, art history and visual culture.

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Director Statement

My work reflects on the nature of femininity and humanity within the contextual framework of humankind’s relationships with other species and notions of our common qualities. I take a performative approach, incorporating my body and drawing on my personal experiences for material. I work in a variety of mediums, with a main focus on performance and film. I consider the symbolic nature of filmmaking within a historical narrative, and the mixing of genres and familiar tropes. My practice also explores specific cultural influences and family heritage. Archetypes and influences from visual culture—from fairy tales to film—have shaped my identity and appear as remnants in my work. Critical and guilty at the same time, I participate in the world I help to create, using a seductive aesthetic to lure and delay the sting of critique.