Women Make Waves International Film Festival

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    Once

    Elle Flanders 2002 Canada Experimental b/w 12min
    Once is a film about language, loss, and the construction of memory through language. Through voiceovers and fragmented footage, the characters in Once tell how they have come to study language in an attempt to relocate themselves at particular junctures in their lives. They describe their desire to learn Yiddish, a language they have speculative connections to or memories of. Their distance from the language and its intrinsic power to link them to an identity seems to increase their appetites for this language lost. Yiddish, it appears, while providing the elements of language, also represents a loss for, and only draws them further from, notions of home. Using architectural footage to evoke the structural elements of language, the buildings also represent places we have all inhabited both in our imaginations and in our daily lives. Both the images and the words impress us at once as magical and defining yet melancholic. Echoed in the images with footage that at moments appear to be akin to aged home movies, and at other times contemporary or archival. Once functions visually and verbally to suggest both language and home are ephemeral. Once is a film that places language at the centre of images, at times allowing the spoken word to dominate while we are suffused with metaphoric imagery.

    Director

    Elle Flanders

    ELLE FLANDERS Elle Flanders is a photographer and filmmaker. Her award-winning feature documentary, Zero Degrees of Separation about the conflict in Israel and Palestine as experienced by two Israeli-Palestinian mixed gay couples, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2005. In 1989 she photographed women's resistance to the occupation during the first Intifada and exhibited in North America as Crossing Borders: Israel Palestine, A Photographer's Peace Initiative. In 1995, as a fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, she began making film and installation work.Her short film Once, a look at Yiddish and the utopian desire for home, premiered at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival. She is currently working on a new feature documentary.

    Elle Flanders

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