BOISBUCHET RESIDENCY PROGRAMME
GAËLLE DENIS
SEASON 2020
Working on her own films, as well as opera and dance pieces, hybrid animations, and CGI and multimedia projects, British-French filmmaker Gaelle Dennis has won numerous awards for her short films Fish Never Sleep (Cannes Film Festival 2002, BAFTA 2003), City Paradise (BAFTA nominee 2005), Rhapsody in Blueberry (national competition Clermont-Ferrand 2017), to name just a few. After studying animation at Arts Décoratifs in Paris, she then joined the animation department at the Royal College of Art in London in the U.K., the city she has been based in for over twenty years. For her two feature films, La Fille d’ Estuaire and Shadowland, Gaelle was hailed by the Torino Film Lab, Jerusalem Film Lab, and the Next Step program for Critic’s Week as one of the most promising filmmakers of her generation. Other films include The Nightingale and the Rose (2011) and After the Rain (2007), as well as operatic and theatrical pieces, such as two hours of video projections for the musical SHOES by Richard Thomas (2010).
“What I love about Boisbuchet is the interdisciplinary way of thinking, and also the relationship to nature.”
“Because I work a lot on computers, in animation, I work on visual effects, doing sometimes quite complex animation, I wanted to come back to the basics of the image, the composition, the point of view.”
After writing two feature films, Gaelle came to Boisbuchet to develop a new narrative and visual style for her next project. Fascinated by the boundary between fantasy and reality, and the narrative of passage from real to unreal, Gaelle’s objective during her residency was to build a Camera Obscura to explore new ways of perceiving reality. She was particularly eager to harness the natural landscape of Boisbuchet and its surrounding area to create a mysterious atmosphere, halfway between a dream and reality.
Having utilised the workshop to construct the Camera Obscura, as well as converting the rooms in the dependence and the Chateau into pinhole cameras, Gaelle produced a series of ethereal images of Boisbuchet, casting a new light on it (quite literally) in the process. Gaelle also experimented with other techniques, such as solar exposure and processing. The images she produced, of Boisbuchet’s architectural park, its staff, and the other creative residents on site, are unique in their dreamlike quality. They are testament to the creative potential of such photographic innovation, as well as to the cinematic imagery of Boisbuchet.
