Screening and talk
Where: Chateau Curioso, 641 Caffin Avenue, Holy Cross
When: 7:30pm, Screening at 8pm
Admission – free and open to the public
Big Thank you to PARSE NOLA and the FRONT for the equipment and chairs. Without you we wouldn’t be able to do these wonderful garden events.
“Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows.” – Flannery O’Connor
Filmmaker Bianca Lucas (PL, based in Paris) is developing two films that are strongly connected to the south, inspired by both Southern Gothic literature and its obsession with redemption. During The Anatomy of a Ghost, she will contextualise her current research by sharing her earlier films (Before Passing, Bogeyman) as well as a short video essay completed during the Deltaworkers residency. While in residence, Bianca is reflecting on trauma and breaking patterns of violence. She wonders if sometimes the only way to see a ghost is by first finding its shadow.
At Deltaworkers, Bianca is both exploring her fascination with Southern Gothic and broadly researching the region’s past and current traumas. She is scrutinizing both in the context of patterns of violence, searching for possible solutions to breaking them. She hopes for her stay to culminate in a feature-length script and short film.
The feature length, docu-fiction project follows a young man living in a community on the Louisiana-Mississippi border. A history of brutality and grief (partially rooted in colonialism and slavery) seems to taint many personal lives in this community, by virtue of cursed energy. Many 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 inherited violence. Is it possible to break free from patterns dictated by communal and personal trauma?
The prospective short film project focuses on the process of so-called psychological ‘de-carceration’, by looking at processes involved in the re-socialisation of both domestic violence survivors and ex-convicts.
Bianca is also researching the history of the so-called Fiancées de la Baleine- the ‘undesirable’ women recruited from an asylum in Paris and shipped to Louisiana to help populate the French 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. This research is conducted towards a feature-length fiction film.
Bianca 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.
Deltaworkers
