Chiara is a filmmaker working with animation, experimental film, documentary and sound to explore the ways in which we perceive, remember, articulate and preserve personal and collective histories and place through the filter of memory and the imagination.
Her work stems from an interest in the moving image as a tool through which to experiment with the boundaries of time and space, both conceptually and physically, re-enchanting the experience and perception of reality through an encounter between the poetics of the real and the erratic and subversive language of dream and the imagination.
Sound and music play a crucial role, guiding and displacing the eye, allowing the viewer to engage with the manifold layers of interpretation of the real, erasing and magnifying tones and nuances, building up to a lyrical portrait of place at once objective and profoundly subjective, almost subliminal.
Her most recent works, “ A Walk Through Wooda” a film-cycle developed and filmed on location in North Cornwall, and “La Frequenza Fantasma (The Ghost Frequency)”, feature-length documentary film-poem developed and filmed in a village in the South of Italy, have been directly involved with specific locations and communities as the starting point for a process-based inquiry into the relationship between people, place and memory. Engaging with time as physical matter through a careful and protracted period of observation through an animator’s eye, keen on allowing for minute transformations to occur and unlock all kind of quiet epiphanies, her work attempts to uncover at once the layers of historical sediment that have accumulated in space through time, and to reap new myths through a personal interpretation and direct encounter with place and narrative, anchoring her visual language firmly in the liminal space between documentary and fiction.
Her work has included collaborations with performance artists, composers, musicians and writers, and has been shown in a number of venues including national and international film festivals, galleries and site specific events.
Chiara is also the founder and curator of The Light & Shadow Salon, a monthly film salon at The Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury.
All work on this website © 2012 Chiara Ambrosio
