ANNIE’S COVID-19 HAIKU:
what if we could truly pause
forget time, the clock
and count instead in blades of grass
Annie Berman is a media artist living and working in New York City. Her background in photography and psychology inspires work about visual culture, religion, and the changing media landscape. Named one of Independent Magazine’s 10 Filmmakers to Watch in 2016, her films, videos, performances, and installations have shown internationally in galleries, festivals, universities, and conferences, including the MoMA Documentary Fortnight, Rooftop Films, Spring/Break Arts Fair, The Boston Jewish Film Festival, Galerie Patrick Ebensperger Berlin, Kassel Hauptbahnhof, Babycastles Gallery, and the Rome Independent Film Festival where she was awarded the Best Experimental Film Prize. Her work has received support from the Puffin Foundation, Wave Farm, the Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Arts, the Center for Independent Documentary, Signal Culture, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Grant for the Web, and UnionDocs. She teaches writing at City College, holds an MFA in Integrated Media Art from Hunter College and is a member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective.
LABA PROJECT :
Berlin Notebook (work in process) is a 360 VR essay film, an intimate, first-person story of a NYC-artist on her first and last trip to Berlin. Told she resembles Anne Frank, she floats through the city feeling like her doppelganger’s aged-ghost.
This VR essay explores the uncanny effects of wearing a VR headset, the (im)possibility of being present, to recreate and share the experience of the unreal, of dissociation, of disembodiment that the filmmaker felt when traveling through Berlin for the first time – one foot grounded in the physical, the other, traipsing across history and memory. “In Berlin, the setting is the story,” she recounts, “so many stories just below the surface.”
Her voice invites the viewer into her head as she attempts to untangle this strange disembodied sensation the city instills in her. Encounters with the major sites, archival materials, locals, an old friend, slowly unearth her unreconciled inherited trauma from the holocaust and need for historical memory.
WHAT IS A SURPRISING CHOICE YOU MADE THIS YEAR?
To abandon plans and take things one day at a time