Swollen Stigma

Director: Sarah Pucill

Year: 2021

A surreal journey, shot on sumptuous colour 16mm, into a sinister realm of gender display and its consequences. Behind the red curtain of a theatrical stage, a masked woman in a nude bodysuit performs to an invisible but enthusiastic audience. By manipulating male puppets, she acts out the threat of sexual violence. The character manifests the tension between internal anxiety and external sensuality.<br /> Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Experimenta

Director: Sarah Pucill

Year: 2016

Taking its title from the French Surrealist artist, Claude Cahun’s (1894-1954) incomplete memoir 'Confidences au miroir', Sarah Pucill's film brings life to the photographic and written archive of Claude Cahun amidst a visual extravaganza of costumes and hand-made sets. <br /> Following Cahun’s text, the film includes Cahun’s early and later life and work, including her political propaganda activity and imprisonment in Jersey with her partner Suzanne Malherbe during the Nazi occupation of the island. The tracing of a life is made conscious through the projection of images of the couples' home in Jersey into a domestic London setting.<br /> As a sequel to director Sarah Pucill's previous film 'Magic Mirror' (2013), this film continues her experiment to bring cinematic life to the photographic and written archive of Claude Cahun. In this film Pucill animates re-stagings of Cahun’s black and white self-portrait and still–life photographs with voices from Cahun's text 'Confidences au miroir', collaging and transposing black and white stills and words, into colour and soundscape.<br /> Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand - World premiere

Director: Sarah Pucill

Year: 2008

I'm not aware of you taking my skin, says the artist's mother to the camera as it zooms in on her eye as close as the lens will allow. Taking My Skin tracks a dialogue between the artist and her mother. Their exchange ranges from narrating the filming process 'in the moment' to relations in an earlier time - 'how long do you think it takes for a child to become separate?' Throughout the journey film spaces continuously dissolve and collapse only to separate again. Sometimes the artist is behind the camera, sometimes the mother, sometimes both simultaneously behind and in front, or neither. Both perform, film, and alternately instruct, position and direct the other. Formally and thematically, the film is an exploration of closeness, of synching, and the threat this poses to the self.