Emma Piper-Burket
2021Dream City
Emma Piper-Burket
In Iraqi Kurdistan, two friends — Emma, a filmmaker from the US, and Diana, a local aspiring actress — make a movie. When they begin Diana is living on her own in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan's buzzing capital city. She is studying to be a flight attendant and enjoying the freedom of being independent and young in a growing city. When war returns to Iraq with the invasion of ISIS, Diana moves back to her mother's home in Sulaymaniyah. Now her days pass quietly, mostly indoors. In the darkness of frequent power outages, Diana builds a dream city in her mind.
Dream City
(Always) Next To Me
Emma Piper-Burket
(Always) Next to Me is a 16mm film that pairs abstract sequences of plants developed directly on the film emulsion with intertitles briefly describing what was going on for me personally at the moment the plants were collected. I started the film at the beginning of the pandemic, just after I found out I was pregnant for the first time in April 2020 and finished it just before the birth of my baby in December of the same year.
(Always) Next To Me
The Lilac Game
Emma Piper-Burket
This film is a celebration of springtime and an interactive game the audience is encouraged to play. Volume one of Films for a Future, a series of handmade and hand processed 16mm nature films, is intended for future viewers living in a time when the natural world no longer exists as it does today.
The Lilac Game
If The Edges Start to Hurt
Emma Piper-Burket
There is a big tree in Southwestern New Mexico where wild turkeys often roots. The tree is near a house, and at dusk everyone in that house gets very quiet hoping the turkeys won't get scared away and go somewhere else to sleep. As the birds fly up to the highest branches their wings flap, displacing the wind around them. The whole process can last an hour or more. This is a film about staying supple after heartbreak and what happens when it snows in the desert.
If The Edges Start to Hurt
