It’s been more than a week since the impressing closing event of Berlinale, the award ceronomy, and we are still gladly looking back on all the great films that were part of the Berlinale Shorts Programme. Let us get a deeper insight in the new work of Vergine Keaton!
Born in Lyon, France in 1981, the filmmaker studied graphic design and film. Her short film ‚je criais contre la vie. ou pour elle.‘ (2007) was screened at countless festivals including Cannes as part of the ACID official selection. She followed it with ‚Marzevan‘ which was shown at Les Sommets du cinéma d’animation in Montreal, in Belo Horizonte, at Animanima and Riverside. At this year’s Berlinale Vergine Keaton presents her new film ‚Le Tigre de Tasmanie‚:
‚A thylacine, also known as Tasmanian tiger, paces back and forth inside a zoo. The footage dates back to the 1930s. The last Tasmanian tiger passed away in 1936 – Benjamin. A glacier is gradually melting, there’s no stopping it. Everything is white. Fire follows ice, in the form of an erupting volcano. The forests buckle and collapse under the burden of the lava that spreads out on top of them. Nature exceeds the edges of the screen and reinvents itself. Keaton’s images take their bearings from Romantic-era painting and Symbolism. The sounds of the French musical collective Les Marquises, situated somewhere between neofolk and industrial, underscore the chance of the new inherent in the destruction: dark, sinister, driving, unique and fantastic. Can, must nature empower itself in order to pre-empt its own extinction?‘ (Maike Mia Höhne)
What is your ambition in the film?
I wanted to work on increasing acuity: by the repetition of motifs, by the change of scale, I was aiming at gradually seeing the slightest movements and materials in the image. In other words, I wanted detail to become an event. See nature, its power, its character, infinitely lively. None of these forms seem frozen or permanent.
What do you like about the short form?
Short movies enable working on rapid and brutal forms. I also like the possibility it leaves for experimentation and research during the shooting phase.
What are your future plans?
I would like to promote the idea of exhausting movements and images. I would love to spread this idea to a longer period. Right now, I am working on an installation about Dante’s ‚Inferno‘ and I just started writing an animated feature film.
Berlinale Shorts 