Event details

The UCHV Film Forum is to cultivate educational connections with award-winning filmmakers in workshops on campus or – lately – via Zoom. The Film Forum’s latest friend, Lynette Wallworth will meet us via Zoom on more than one occasion throughout the festival.

Wallworth’s choice to use the new VR technology for the making of Awavena and Collisions allows her to relate the stories of indigenous people without the distortions of a dominant (colonial) perspective inherent in the director’s gaze when comes through the traditional camera. Wallworth’s immersive filmmaking subverts any fixed privileged perspective or hierarchical directions and challenges one to shift into multiple and changing viewpoints as opposed to a single dominating one. Being immersed in an artfully crafted multi-perspectival film can be a therapeutic exercise of letting go of egocentrism. Moreover, being immersed in the cinematic world of _Coral _is an exercise in letting go of anthropocentrism. Human existence is eclipsed by the non-human in Coral, but without the angst of annihilation because we enter into an empathetic fellowship with the ocean.

Lynette Wallworth is an artist whose work ranges from documentary features through VR films to installations and performance art. In the documentary film The Pieces I Am (2019), Toni Morrison reveals that the best analogy for her writing is an interactive installation by another artist. Morrison refers to Lynette Wallworth’s Evolution of Fearlessness. Toni Morrison did not personally meet the artist with whom she felt such close kinship, but the Princeton community will have a chance to. We have the opportunity to get to know Lynette Wallworth not only through her three immersive films that the Film Forum will present but in person - even if for now via Zoom.

Register here.