Amiel Courtin-Wilson
The plague is already here. Pesticides, lies and Paranoia. Tractor beams in the vineyards. A yellow dust coats everything. Everyone is sleepwalking. Steam under the hood. Gravel in the mouth. Tom and Red are back on the road and Red tells Tom to pull over. Reagan delivers the State of the Union on the radio. A body was found next to the river. The sickness is growing.
Bob has lived fearlessly – he snuck off to Woodstock at 15, hung out with Blondie and the Sex Pistols and ended up designing bathrooms for Elton John, Janet Jackson and Versace. But when we meet him, Bob is being cared for by one of his sons. Trapped i n a world of pain and unrelenting movement, he has decided to utilise the Death with Dignity law. Courtin Wilson’s camera stays unflinchingly close on the anger, sadness and joy of Bob’s last seven days while he continues to rail against his disease and says goodbye to family and friends.
A new moving image work by Amiel Courtin-Wilson in response to Pierre Guyotat's text EDEN EDEN EDEN.
Milena travels to a remote opal mining community to see her estranged, ill father. Lost and alone, she falls into his bewildering world, where men escape society and share ideals of freedom. Soon, he doesn’t want her to leave. Stuck in time, father and daughter try to mend their fractured bond, but their connection is fragile, like the strange, colourful gems he digs up from the earth.
Exquisite Corpse was an image and language parlour game played by the Surrealists, which asked players to collectively write or draw a story or picture, with only limited knowledge of the other players’ contributions. Translating the original game into an immersive VR experience creating a composite human body, Exquisite Corpse maintains the rules of the game with artists and filmmakers contributing, each with no knowledge of the others’ work beyond which body part they were representing, with complete artistic freedom.
Charles is a portrait of a middle-aged man I met outside a 7/11 late one night on the outskirts of Oklahoma City in 2015. Charles had been homeless for some years, estranged from his family because of his schizophrenia, and was living by a pond at the back of the convenience store. We instantly formed a very intimate connection due to his gentle and deeply compassionate outlook on life. He told me beautiful stories about how he would talk to the trees and clouds before going to sleep each evening, and his plans to visit his daughter in Memphis before the end of the year. We ate some dinner together by his pond before shooting this portrait at about 3am.
Shot in three days in January 2016, the film captures the legendary jazz pianist Cecil Taylor and Japanese dancer-choreographer Tanaka Min in a delicate interaction. An impressionistic, extremely intimate portrait of the unspoken dynamics between two masters who have been collaborating for over thirty years.
A response to Yoko Ono's Film Script No. 4 “ASK THE AUDIENCE TO STARE AT THE SCREEN UNTIL IT BECOMES BLACK.” I decided to assemble material shot in Cambodia in 2013 during the Cambodia King-Father Norodom Sihanouk’s funeral- a week long period of national mourning in which millions of Cambodians swarmed to Phnom Penh to grieve for the loss of their beloved leader. The profoundly overwhelming nature of this mass grieving seemed to resonate with the notion of an audience literally collectively willing an image out of existence. I chose to read the action of the screen turning black as being due to the audiences collective will rather than something imposed on an audience by the filmmaker/artist.
Phirun is 19 years old and lives in Phnom Penh. One day he is accused of theft and involuntarily injures his employer. Phirun escapes and during his flight, he meets Sovanna; a powerful bond grows between the two of them, and develops into love. Amiel Courtin-Wilson is Australian, and made his debut at the Sundance Film Festival in 2000 with Chasing Buddha; since then he has made many films, screened at the major film festivals. In 2011 he directed Hail, presented at the 68th Venice International Film Festival in the Orizzonti section. Michael Cody, producer, director and screenwriter, has often collaborated with Courtin-Wilson and now they are back together with Ruin.
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
Charming, intelligent and iconoclastic, Ben Lee is an Australian singer-songwriter whose creative growth since his early adolescence has undergone almost relentless media scrutiny. This is a playful yet deeply intimate portrait of Lee, exploring his meteoric rise to pop stardom and the issues of celebrity and spirituality that arise when launched into the spotlight.
You there. It's late. Imagine yourself with the lid coming down. The hymns and requiems. The sense of movement as you're borne along to the next place.
