Bianca Lucas (Poland) completed her first degree at Goldsmiths College, University of London. In 2017, she graduated from a three-year filmmaking course at Béla Tarr’s the Film.Factory, Sarajevo. Her films have been screened at festivals such as International Film Festival Rotterdam, New Horizons International Film Festival, Premiers Plans d’Angers, Winterthur Kurzfilmtage among others. Throughout her studies, she has been mentored by filmmakers such as Carlos Reygadas, Gus Van Sant, Abel Ferrara, Pedro Costa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Guy Maddin, Agnieszka Holland, and many more. Her work seeks to occupy the intersection between narrative fiction and documentary cinema. She is currently based in Paris.
At Deltaworkers, Bianca is developing two projects that are strongly connected to the south- inspired by both Southern Gothic literature and the region’s history of violence. She hopes for her stay to culminate in a short docu-fiction film and a feature-length script.
The short film project follows a young man living in a community on the Louisiana-Mississippi border. Burdened by a history of savage colonialism, slavery and bloodshed- that seems to taint many personal lives by virtue of ‘cursed’ energy- most surrounding residents take the ‘blue pill’ to forget: drowning the echoes of past ghosts out in alcohol, gambling, crystal meth, and sensationalist television. Confronting not only the history and paradoxes of this blood-soaked land, but also the protagonist’s own family’s painful past, the project aims to look at the ways in which, as a society, we deal with a vicious cycle of inherited violence. Is it possible to break free from patterns dictated by communal and personal trauma?
The script project/ research focuses on the so-called Fiancées de la Baleine- the ‘undesirable’ women recruited from an asylum in Paris and shipped to Louisiana to help populate the colony. This project looks into old notions of what ‘undesirable’ (so-called ‘hysterical’) women were considered to be, how this still shapes our perception today and, more generally, into the often-forgotten brutality of the original french colonies in Louisiana and Mississippi.