In August, the Princess Grace Foundation (USA) announced its 2011 grant and scholarship recipients for the areas of theater, dance and film. Among the six filmmakers selected, two are from CalArts: Gina Napolitan-Witz (Film/Video MFA 12) and Temra Pavlovic (Film/Video BFA 12).
The awards help students focus on their work and final projects in the last year of their programs.
An MFA candidate in Experimental Animation, Napolitan-Witz’s work is largely inspired by flea market cast-offs and found objects. Rooted in collage, her films address themes of memory, history and forgetting.
The footage above is from her CalArts’ thesis film (I Am Not Here/Her). Every frame in this excerpt is a 10 to 20 second in-camera exposure.
Temra, a BFA 4 in the Program in Film and Video, has experimented with combinations of documentary, fiction, theater and improvisation. Her films explore “questions about the ‘self’ meeting the ‘other.'”
The Princess Grace Foundation Awards program is among the most competitive and prestigious in the country. Open to select film schools by invitation only, students are nominated by their deans and must have completed at least one film to be considered.
An excerpt from Temra’s girls, girls, girls (2010):