Unitec lecturer scoops international film festival award
Unitec lecturer Miriam Harris’s short film ‘Soaring Roaring Diving’ has been named the best experimental film in the prestigious Brooklyn International Film Festival.
Harris, a senior lecturer at Unitec’s Department of Design and Visual Arts produced ‘Soaring Roaring Diving’ with Dr Juliet Palmer, a New Zealand composer who lives in Toronto.
Harris met Palmer when she was doing post graduate study in digital animation at Sheridan in Toronto - one of the best animation colleges in North America.
“The Brooklyn festival is a real biggie and I was absolutely thrilled the film was chosen as one of only 120 entries to be screened out of 2700,” says Harris.
“Then to hear that we had won the best experimental film was just amazing,” she says.
The pair received a Creative New Zealand Screen Innovation Fund Grant for the project and have spent the past few years sending each other snippets across the internet to create the six minute short.
Harris would send Palmer images, and then she would respond in music or vice versa.
“We wanted to make an experimental animated film rather than a narrative with characters, and for the images and sound to work very closely together,” says Harris.
In terms of themes, both had lost their sisters to terminal illnesses so they agreed that they wanted to look at the themes of working through grief, childhood memories and eventually resurfacing.
The title for the film comes from a letter that Virginia Wolf was writing Harris explains … “She was talking about how the brain is busy soaring roaring and diving … to describe the range of human experience and life’s joys and upheavals.”
They completed ‘Soaring Roaring Diving’ at the end of 2008.
It debuted in Texas in May at the Marfa International Film Festival, before screening at Arts Fest in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, then at the Brooklyn festival and it will screen at the ‘In the Palace Film Festival’ in Sofia, Bulgaria later this month.
‘Soaring Roaring Diving’ has also been selected to screen at the NZ International Film Festival 2009 as part of the ‘Homegrown’ Animation and Experimentation on Video section.
This is an eclectic programme which brings together the cream of Kiwi animators and innovators in a must-see collection of 10 shorts that reflects the diversity and exuberance of its creators.
It screens in Auckland on Fri 24 Jul | 6:00pm | and Sat 25 Jul | 11:15am at SKYCITY Cinemas Queen Street (Running time: 74 mins)
