Experiencing Interruptions?

NEE-SHA - Sound Of The Waves

There was a promo piece on FM4’s new music blog when this video first dropped (FM4: Austria’s still-going, and still-relevant, alt. radio station). It spoke about “the director Katharina Simunic and her team of divers in the Gulf of Thailand”, and then it went onto describe the “impressive” cinematography.

Half of me didn’t want to break the spell, didn’t want to explain that, actually, the team of divers was, um, just me, in a mask and snorkel, with this 300 dollar action-cam the size of a cigarette packet, a camera I’d never used before, underwater, where I’d never filmed before.

The protagonist in “Sound of the Waves” is also struggling to come to terms with a broken spell, struggling to admit that, actually, she’s all alone, too. But it’s not art that’s caused her to believe in a fantasy, it’s her heart.

A friend of mine sent me a photo after he’d seen the video. It was that classic Botticelli painting with the goddess being brought into existence in an oyster shell, with “The (water-)Birth of (the Black) Venus” as a caption.

A film has to be judged on its merits, of course, but I’m still proud of the back-story, the subtly radical feminist and black-story. Nee-Sha made all the music herself in Vienna, and then she transmogrified into a free-diving mermaid supermodel during a one week trip to Thailand. And silly old me with my laptop is a team of divers rebirthing Botticelli but more progressively. We two sisters are really doing it for ourselves.

  • Katharina Simunic
    Director
  • Project Type:
    Music Video
  • Runtime:
    4 minutes 50 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    May 9, 2024
  • Production Budget:
    2,000 EUR
  • Country of Origin:
    Austria
  • Country of Filming:
    Thailand
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography - Katharina Simunic

Katharina Simunic is a filmmaker and human rights activist from Vienna, Austria. Her first documentary "Europe, Can You See Me?" (AT, 2021) was shot on the Croatian-Bosnian border in the middle of the pandemic, though most of the time was spent providing first aid and delivering food to the refugees whose stories she was trying to tell. Back in the city, she leads film workshops on children's rights and gender equality in high schools, and loves to film feminist music videos.
Though she’s regularly called upon to assist on other people’s projects, most of her own work has just one name on the credits. Camera, Direction, Production, Sound, Screenplay, Editing (and Pretty-Much-Everything you can think of or have maybe forgotten as well) by Katharina Simunic. A filmmaker who literally makes her own films.

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