Witnessing my daughter’s passage though childhood with a 35mm Russian movie camera.

Souvenir explores the deserted inside of contemporary 36-hour- minicruise ferry ships between the Netherlands, Germany, Norway and the UK. As a low-budget replica of luxurious Caribbean cruises, the ship is in a constant state of transit, never arriving at a final destination. On board settings and décor bear reference to a European history of seafaring and trade while the actual ocean remains distant – in surveillance monitors, the on-board cinema and panoramic window fronts. A female voiceover is composed out of different interviews with seamen’s widows, somewhere in between dialogue and inner monologue, circling around topics of distant love, memory, fury and a departure from society’s expectations. Starting from a documentary observation of the inside space, the limits of outer and inner reality become blurred over the course of the film. Single souvenirs as fetishized objects turn into a unified ornament as the point of view shifts from the individual to the collective.
The film as a souvenir itself opens up memories of a colonial past, drawing a connection between the ship as the largest arsenal of imagination and the nautic space of the cinema.
Excerpt: https://vimeo.com/305552552

How Death Valley found a name. The Desert Forgotten juxtaposes a quintessentially contemporary account of the region, satellite imaging, with one of the first accounts on record. 16mm film on video.

Excerpt: https://vimeo.com/289740232

Filmed in the Andean Mountains in the traditional lands of the Atacameño, Aymara, and Calchaquí-Diaguita in Northern Chile and Northwest Argentina, ALTIPLANO takes place within
a geological universe of ancestral salt flats, volcanic deserts, and coloured lakes. Fusing earth with sky, day with night, heartbeat with mountain, and mineral with iridescent cloud, ALTIPLANO reveals a vibrating landscape in which a bright blue sun forever threatens to eclipse a blood-red moon. Coupled with a soundscape generated from infrasound recordings of volcanoes, geysers, Chilean blue whales, and more, ALTIPLANO makes use of in-camera editing to create evocative visual rhythms through the clash of color and form. Landscapes pulse and stutter, transformed through complex 16mm pixelation and superimposition techniques into spaces that exist in a multitude of times simultaneously. Located at the heart of a natural ecosystem threatened by a century of saltpeter and nitrate mining practices, and recent geothermic exploitation, ALTIPLANO reveals an ancient land standing witness to all that is, was, and will be.
Website: https://vimeo.com/malenaszlam