ANNA KANNAVA: LOAM AND LINGUA

THURSDAY 22 NOVEMBER, 8PM
AFW/ARENA, 2 KERR ST, FITZROY | $7 (CASH ONLY)

Anna Kannava: Loam and Lingua

A key moment in the work of Cypriot-Australian film-maker Anna Kannava (1959-2011):

The year is 2008 and Anna is seeing off her friend Natalie Vella, on her way to Europe. They are making a film, KISSING PARIS, on consumer digital video, with a few other friends and not much more than a pocketful of coins and a handful of favours, thrillingly like most young and hungry filmmakers. Anna is 49, and this is to be her second, and sadly last, feature film, after the more "professional" (i.e. funded) DREAMS FOR LIFE, and a string of acclaimed experimental and documentary films of varying lengths (THE MEETING OF VENUS, VANILLA ESSENCE). Anna takes a few shots of Natalie passing through customs, and they end up in the film.

Anna waits, then joins Natalie in Paris to complete shooting. Nothing necessarily remarkable about this, save perhaps for the waiting (and Anna's films are veritably suffused with waiting, in all its different forms: longing, impatience, dread, expectation, yearning...)

Anna's life-work contains multitudes, stitched together from large, multi-hyphenate patches - new migrant, CALD artist, published (and unpublished) author, performer, animator, student. Keenly literary and visually tactile, Anna's early experimental and documentary films show an already formed proto-modernist (and sometime post-modernist) at work, a weaver of disparate elements... but also a traditionalist, invested in something fundamental - a cinema of "these people", "these things", "these times", captured precisely for the point at which they vanish.

The two films that are the centrepiece of the program - TEN YEARS AFTER... TEN YEARS OLDER and THE BUTLER - represent the axiomatic fulcrum of these latter tendencies in Anna's cinema - they are material and abstract, past and present or, put another way, they are bout the very big (histories, familes, nations, oceans) meeting the very small (one home, one brother, one window).

PROGRAM:

TEN YEARS AFTER... TEN YEARS OLDER (1986, 35 min, 16mm/Digital)

THE BUTLER (1997, 59 min, 16mm/Digital)

Plus

VANILLA ESSENCE (1989, 16 min, 16mm/Digital)