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Violet
Violet, a lover of dogs and birds, lives in the shadow theatre of her mind. Suspended between the mark of her memories and the world of extinction, the futility of existence has become a new and intolerable reality. Longing to eclipse the stagnation of her depression, she discovers a magical tightrope swinging quietly beneath her imagination. Seizing upon it, Violet glimpses the mirage of her future, where the work of love is hers to set free, one bird at a time.
A two-act folktale on love in an age of extinction
Director’s statement
Violet is the first of a series of short films that make up the Requiem collection, a project initially begun as an acoustic songwriting project focused on the paradoxes of existential choice in our age of extinction.
In its film form, Violet is a tiny giant, wagering the need for a certain kind of mental fitness for the gravity, and the rites of passage, that characterise a search for selfhood amidst the volatile stakes of environmentalism. Equally, Violet is a thought experiment trained on the empowering role of the imagination as it measures the choice to remain within the world for the sake of love.
Staged on a miniature vintage book theatre set, and leaning heavily on iconographic symbolism (in particular, the binarised soul of light and darkness), Violet inhabits the nebulous territory of dream state to bring the mind’s plural slipstreams to life.
With Violet comes a burlesque vision of the psyche, where childhood memories of animal cruelty, eclectic extinction notices, peculiar zoological proofs and an ark-like figurine collection coalesce amidst a whimsy for transformation, a defiant will to endure, and the visualisation of intention.
Violet’s hybridised elements of electroacoustic soundscape, live dance theatre, stop motion animation and poetry collude, not only to capture a sense of the metamorphosis and enchantment characteristic of early surrealist cinema, but to find expression for the more haunting unthinkable, unsayable truths that influence an ethics of existence in our time.
The Requiem collection
The Requiem collection is a short film collection, initially begun as an acoustic songwriting project focused on the paradoxes of existential choice in our age of extinction.
The songs of Requiem were written by Angie Contini over seven years (largely in the cracks and gaps of other projects and plans) and recorded live in 2024 with voice and piano at Church St Studios, Sydney, with engineer Michelle Barry.
In their song form, the collection mobilises a small army of archetypal figures, narratives and symbols to respond eclectically to one of the fundamental questions of human existence ~ which voices, forces, controls or influences ultimately guide our most basic life choices?
Within this, the office of the artist, the difficult work of love, and the cultural embedments of dogmatic ideology are central.
In the songs’ extension into film form, The Salons draws heavily on early cinema styles to find eclectic expression for the stories within, and to bring a sense of serendipity and lightness to the heavy ground of their lyrical origins ~ the timeless delights of shadow play, silhouette and stop motion animation merge with the quirks and glitches of absurdism, burlesque and surrealism, to capture a sense of nature’s extraordinary forces of transformation and wonder, within which we are a part.