ELIZABETH

PERSONAL WORK (EXPERIMENTAL)

JPG

MP4 6m:11s

Title of Piece:	ELIZABETH
Production Company:	Celia Arias
Director(s):	Manuel Mollá, Celia Arias
Client:	Nowness
Short Synopsis:	An echoing question rises: does the world end in fire, or with a single song? Elizabeth Gibson stars in ‘Elizabeth’, directed by visual artists Manuel Mollá and Celia Arias in their debut collaboration. Gibson hauntingly weaves an otherworldly narrative of a lonely woman, participating in the daily rituals of a life lived alone. A fragmented pastiche of her lived experiences reverberates around the setting, seeping in and blending with the subject’s otherwise mundane reality. Whilst there are grander themes at play here on the fragility of life, the central character in front of Mollá's lens subverts that to focus on the individual, asking not who we are, but rather who we were and how we can become fixated on this idealisation of ourselves. Ultimately, ‘Elizabeth’may be read as a reflective interrogation into aging, isolation and memory. Released at a poignant time when the world’s population is self isolating to protect itself from a dystopian threat, the film serves as a temporal response to the collective anxiety, loneliness & repetition of daily tasks currently being experienced by people of all ages around the globe. The strange beauty that permeates through Mollá & Arias' film nods towards the optimistic glimmer that, through art, we may connect and thrive through these times and find comfort in our memories.