Sarah Pucill’s film, Eye Cut (2021), has been awarded best experimental film at Toronto Women Film Festival 2022 and London New Wave Film Festival 2022.
The film’s protagonist is a masked woman in a nude bodysuit, who wears a cardboard box that doubles as a theatre The film’s protagonist is a masked woman in a nude bodysuit, who wears a cardboard box that doubles as a theatre stage. The woman takes us on a surrealist journey in which she performs to an invisible applauding audience. Having passed through red curtains writhing on her back, she arrives on stage bearing a cake on her front. Hand-held cardboard puppets, that she makes from magazine cut-outs of faceless men, go on to take part in an ominous party scene around the cake, candle-lit and spinning. The audience see the woman in disguise, her eyes peeping through cut out eye holes of a man’s cardboard face, as if taking his place. She changes her mask and its gender throughout, sometimes wearing two.
Moving from the abstract to the overt, the film sets up a dialogue between an interior experience of a sensory landscMoving from the abstract to the overt, the film sets up a dialogue between an interior experience of a sensory landscape with the outside world, where the privacy of the body is made uncomfortably public. Eye Cut is an experiment of what can and cannot be enunciated before we are taken to the final ‘stage’ scene, where cut out text from the Me Too movement projects as a backcloth in a domestic space as she tries to eat.
Eye Cut is an experimental film, shot on color 16mm and distributed by Lux.
Performer: Laura Matilde Mannino
Direction, camera and edit: Sarah Pucill
Sound Consultant: Mairead McClean
Rushes Grade: Fraser Watson
Sound Mix and Online Edit: Konrad Welz
Find out more about the 11th edition of the Toronto Women Film Festival in Toronto Film Magazine.
‘Eye Cut’ is selected for screening at the following festivals: Montreal Independent Film Festival (April 2022), Berlin International Independent Film Festival (April 2022).
