Vivian Ostrovsky

The film is a travelogue of sorts. Ostrovsky’s personal family footage meets the archives of Soviet propaganda footage. The result is a kind of Khruschev-era mix with a collage of Soviet music and a voice-over of my reminiscences of the Cold War era.

"Readings. A place. Purity of lines. Fine angles. Dominance of whites and blues. Fragility of tapered glasses." A visual evocation of the writing of Katherine Mansfield.

The voices say a story. forget it. Of what time. And who speaks. Both of them. One or the other. later. Others may be. Of chance. Which would cross in this narrative. When. The times have intermingled. The winds meet. History. Pictures. The summer. Humble vacancy with furtive foliage. Fragile memory. Light is a trace of forgetfulness.

Originally a text in fragments, more or less biographical, of different characters. Crossed stories, mixed times, memories and inventions. Coming from the voices encountered. They look like text like sisters. They are the voices of memory, the shadows cast by the characters, the voices of girls, the voices of indecision and evocation. We begin with this work: to read, to record (in analog, it takes breath). Here comes a place, a place found: the foliage of a vine in the South, crossed by the wind Mistral: a landscape. Where are we? Where the boy dies, would we see what he sees? Where was the child playing in the neighborhood? At the heart of the narrative, at the heart of the written word? That would happen. Harvesting images, shifting gears, Multiplying the generations with the listening of the voices, even in memory sometimes.

Readings. Heinrich von Kleist / Robert Walser. Contiguous. They talk about imagination. Walser imagines Kleist, Kleist nobody, but Penthesilea. In the new desert islands that are the enclaves of flowers of the city. Roses of sidewalks. Wild spaces with anonymity, truncated and without paths, in the banal stones of any career, inscribe and break the voices of an abrupt literary, hermetic and arid fragments in the image of places, almost no of place. Images figures of writing. In the blind corner. Without access. Very few signs.

An unknown writer written under the pseudonym of Laure at the beginning of the century. Readings. Geography. The places of a writing. The forces that create, traverse and lose it. The two image strips will be contiguous on the same screen. Their continuous and simultaneous operation. Two mirrors. The voices and their silences are reflected in it. Fade away.

A new short film by Vivian Ostrovsky remembering Chantal Akerman, beginning with their first meeting in the early 1970s. Using her own footage of Chantal Akerman, the filmmaker remembers a few moments that illustrate Chantal's personality. Forty years of friendship condensed into four minutes...

Vivian Ostrovsky is a nomad film-maker, born in New York. Student in Brazil then in Paris, which takes its camera of continent in continent since 1980. Her work, in the border of the documentary and the experimental, touches the filmed journals and is interested in the individuals rather than in the masses, in the physical language, in the unusual of the situations and in the sensible editing of the images and the sounds.

DVD gathering 16 films by Vivian Ostrovsky made between 1982 and 2014.