Private Project

Mūtātiōnem

When the pandemic hit, I began to write again in pencil. I felt anxious until I could accept a fragmented interior with a hundred variations and versions, everything in process–process over progress. Text, audio, visual-both moving and still, compilations, complications, towards combobulations, if that is what comes. This is a time capsule of fragments, reflecting a fragmented time. These fragments try to tell the story, to encourage a sense of what happened. Small works, notes, moments: my daughter at three, dappled light on her face through the window as she lay on the floor looking at the camera’s screen turned towards her, a beautiful image that later has me thinking of contagion. A voice recording recalling a dream I had when pregnant and trying to come to terms with my ecological guilt of bringing another consuming life form into an over-consuming world; a dream where I hatch a baby dragon that I knew was dangerous, but loved and cared for nonetheless. The 2020 super moon captured on another sleepless night, with an unnerving podcast from a celebrated epidemiologist in the very quiet background, my hand shaking with the listening, image shaking with my hand. Footage from the Apollo Moon mission–also having me thinking of contagion. The song I created in mourning, from an archive of extinct and endangered birds and forest soundscape. All together, somehow, trying, and transmitting, a sense of.

  • Maile Costa Colbert
    Director
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short, Other
  • Genres:
    Sci-fi, ecocinema, disaster, found footage, experimental, Post-Apocalyptic
  • Runtime:
    9 minutes 17 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    May 7, 2021
  • Country of Origin:
    Portugal
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    18:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Prismatic Ground
    New York
    United States
    April 8, 2021
    World Premiere
    Official Selection
  • ECRA
    Rio de Janeiro
    Brazil
    July 16, 2022
    Latin America
  • ROFIFE
    Ankara
    Turkey
    March 15, 2022
Director Biography - Maile Costa Colbert

Maile Costa Colbert is an intermedia artist, researcher, and educator with a focus on time-based media. She is currently a PhD Research Fellow in Artistic Studies with a concentration on Sound Studies, cinematic sound design, and its relationship with soundscape ecology at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, through the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, and a visiting lecturer at the Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto and ISMAI. Her current practice and research project is titled, Wayback Sound Machine: Sound through time, space, and place (http://www.mailecolbert.com/proj-wayback.html), and asks what we might gather from sounding the past. She is a collaborator with the art organization Binaural (www.binauralmedia.org), a member of CineLab, IFILNOVA's research lab for cinema and philosophy (www.fcsh.unl.pt), and is an editor and author at Sonic Field (http://sonicfield.org/author/mailecolbert/). She has exhibited, screened, and performed around the globe, including in The New York Film Festival, The Ear to Earth Festival for Electronic Music Foundation in NY, LACE Gallery in Los Angeles, MOMA New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Serralves em Festa in Porto, and the REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles, among other venues. She has designed sound and composed for such works as Irene Lusztig’s feature documentaries Yours in Sisterhood and The Motherhood Archives, Rebecca Baron's film How Little We Know of Our Neighbors, winner of the Black Maria Film Festival Best Film, Adele Horne's feature documentary The Tailenders, broadcasted on PBS POV and winner of a 2007 Independent Spirit Award, and Allan Sekula's epic The Lottery of the Sea.

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