Official Section 2023

A Woman Escapes

Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik, Blake Williams | 2022 | 81'

SYNOPSIS

Audrey Benac lives alone in Paris after having moved there to tend to the home of her recently deceased friend. She struggles to find her footing in the world, moving through the days without any clear motivation or sense of purpose. Audrey forges a correspondence with two male filmmakers.

BIOGRAPHY

Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik, Blake Williams

SOFIA BOHDANOWICZ (Toronto, 1985) is an MFA graduate of York University’s Film Production program, an alumni of Berlinale Talents as well as the TIFF Talent Accelerator. Never Eat Alone (2016) was her debut, a later directed Maison du Bonheur (2018) and MS Slavic 7 (2019), which she co-directed with Deragh Campbell, presented at the Berlinale, competing as well in FILMADRID’s Official Section.

BURAK ÇEVIK (Istanbul, 1993) received his BA in Film Faculty at the Istanbul Bilgi University. He founded Fol Cinema Society and curated experimental and art house film screenings. His feature length films The Pillar of Salt (2018), Belonging (2019) and Forms of Forgetting (2023), premiered at the Berlinale Forum.

BLAKE WILLIAMS (Houston, Texas, 1985), is an artist and filmmaker based in Toronto. His 3D films have screened in festivals such as Berlinale, New York, Locarno, FID Marseille, Jeonju, Oberhausen, and FILMADRID (Something Horizontal had its Spanish premiere at the Vanguardias Section in 2016).

Multimedia

Critical text

A film of daytime mourning reflected in the multiple registers of its voluble fiction. An opaque vibration of a six-handed document filmed in 4K, 16 mm and 3D (the latter format comes from the hand of Blake Williams). Filmic letters, voice-overs and the constancy of change in an image of absence. A woman escapes twists Robert Bresson's quasi-homonymous film to anchor itself in a manifestation of solitude through the abstraction of accompaniment. In the post-COVID-19 framework, an impossible escape routine is established in which Bohdanowicz's regular Audrey (Benac) tries to overcome the loss of her friend Juliane with the help of the two other filmmakers who are thousands of miles away. Strata of verbal connotation in planes that register objects that register, verbalised metaphors, channels and forms reproduced in time.... Private images that become public and are even subtracted and adulterated. Rust impotence and melancholic corrosion. Sarah Davachi's music guides this work that is as much diary as fiction rooted in an impenetrable mourning; as inert as it is elusive in its audiovisual cadence. Are the images of some the answer to those of others? BORJA CASTILLEJO CALVO

Technical Sheet