Sarah Pucill’s latest film Double Exposure (2023) has been awarded Best Experimental Film at this year’s Toronto Women Film Festival.
Double Exposure re-stages photographs of Pucill and her once partner, filmmaker Sandra Lahire that were made collaboratively shortly before Lahire’s death from anorexia in 2001. Set inside an otherwise quiet studio, black and white interior scenarios are played out with picture frames, chairs, and a dining table, whilst street sounds from outside are heard as the filmmaker re- positions her body inside the celluloid projections of herself and Lahire. These inner walls of photographs from another time, are re-lived through posed living tableaux as if in stilled time. Still and moving merge also with out-takes from a film made soon after Lahire’s death. Contrasting this, the start and end, that bookend the film, show an open space of 16mm film that bleeds colour over a sea, sky and sun, as well as a half collapsed pier in Brighton from the 2001 fire. In a further layer, Pucill voices quotes from a text Lahire was writing at the time the photos were made. Quotes from the painter Georgio de Chirico’s and poet Sylvia Plath’s reflect on aesthetics, love, memory, camera and psyche and the politics of a feminist queer body.
The seasonal and annual Toronto Women Film Festival is an international IMDb qualifying event and a screening platform devoted to the promotion and screening of female talents from all over the globe. Throughout the past years, the festival has screened its annual finalists at the Carlton Cinema and Innis Town Hall of the University of Toronto in parallel to TIFF in September of every year. The nominees of the seasonal competition are also offered online promotion and screening every season through the festival committee. The festival team recently announced the winners of the 19th edition which brings together female directors, producers, actresses, cinematographers and all artists contributing to the language of cinema as women in film. It is our pleasure to announce the latest winners of the seasonal competition.
Find out more about the 19th edition of the Toronto Women Film Festival via the festival website.
