Madi Piller
2021View From Here
Madi Piller
Jorge and Alex [Luxando curators] paired me with an artist that they knew, and I only discovered later that it was Ana Maria. I did not know her before this film. The only direction I had passed on via Jorge and Alex was that this film was about depression. Ana Maria's sound design was first revealed to me when I watched the film at Luxando. I was very pleased with her work. —MP
View From Here
Not Moldova 1937
Madi Piller
"In another virtuoso turn, the artist brings her exemplary camera eye to Moldova, home of her grandparents, before they were driven out along with their Jewish comrades, thousands of them killed. Fragments of survivor testimonials mix with archival photographs and objects, along with present-day city celebrations (what is being forgotten in these civic rites of memory?). Haunted natural scapes grow over the dead, the abandoned graveyards and stones mark the places where culture and community used to be performed. This is a synoptic act of grieving, but also: a summoning of the present, a conjuring of the thousand ways that the betrayals of neighbours and friends marked out the Jews who had lived peaceably amongst them for generations, newly caught now in a terror of state oppression and greed."- Mike Hoolboom
Not Moldova 1937
The Shifting Sands
Madi Piller
Jacques Madvo's documentary, "Israel: Land of Destiny" (1977), is abstracted in "The Shifting Sands", a new film by Madi Piller. Piller's film asserts the intersection of history and identification with the Land through the personal struggles of the filmmaker's father as a young Jewish refugee, arriving in 1946 in Palestine. High contrast, repeated images of the war in 1948 immediately after the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel (to be known as the State of Israel) interact with Madvo's observations of Israeli society after its first thirty years of existence. The film juxtaposes images in a fractured timeline that reflects on the acceptance of the formation of a Jewish state. The work is framed within the philosophical thinking of Martin Buber and the recent history of Israel. Shifting sands can both erase and reveal human endeavour.
The Shifting Sands
Into the Light: The Film Resistance
Madi Piller
Biomorphic shapes at play in this film reiterate and expose the persistence of vision, frame flickering and illusions. The random cycling images question who is the projector and who is the projectionist, while light forms the sound frequencies.
Into the Light: The Film Resistance
