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Before Your Inner Eye: Seeing as a Profession

Before Your Inner Eye: Seeing as a Profession

Date
Feb 16th 2022
With
Ari Wegner, Marta Simões , Jenny Lou Ziegel moderated by Elen Lotman
Often considered to the "eye" of a production, cinematographers are responsible for translating a director's ideas into images, before the material is sent over to the editing room. Yet this linear way of looking at creative procedures, by no means wrong, can be reversed to view creation as obeying an altogether another temporality: instead of the classic threefold construction of pre-production, production and post-production, we can imagine storytelling as a process of permanent “seeing” that manifests itself immersively. This session gathers exclusively cinematographer alumnae from Berlinale Talents, and whereas Jenny Lou and Marta have their new films in this year's Berlinale Forum, Ari can add fresh experiences from having worked on Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog lately. Altogether, they bring a new view of creation into view by rewinding and reassembling their different approaches, allowing us to see the creative work of seeing anew.

Ari Wegner

Ari Wegner is a cinematographer who made her debut in 2003 with the short film A SHORT PORTRAIT OF ZORA ZAKOWSKI. Wegner has worked on movies like THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET PRINCE OF DENMARK (2007), GREY MATTER (2011) and TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG (2019). For her cinematograhy in LADY MACBETH (2016) she won a BIFTA award. The acclaimed cinematographer recently shot THE POWER OF THE DOG (2021) by Jane Campion.
© Ben King

Marta Simões

Marta Simões is a cinematographer based in Lisbon. She graduated in Cinema from Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema in Lisbon and finished her last year in Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires. In 2014 she was part of the Berlinale Talents and in 2016 she finished her masters in Visual Cultures in Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa. FLORES, PAST PERFECT, SUPER NATURAL (Jorge Jácome), THE BITE, BECOMING MALE IN THE MIDDLE AGES (Pedro Neves Marques), NHA MILA (Denise Fernandes), ATÉR (Marie Fages) are some of the films she worked as a DOP. Besides her core work as a cinematographer she has also taken part in the process of creative development and writing of several projects.
© JJ

Jenny Lou Ziegel

Jenny Lou Ziegel studied cinematography at German Film and Television Academy in Berlin, graduating in 2012 with the feature film REPORTED MISSING. Her work includes numerous shorts and features, frequently shown at international festivals, including the Berlinale, Cannes, Locarno and NYFF. AFTERWATER by Dane Komljen will be screening in this years Berlinale Forum and SONNE UNTER TAGE at the Forum Expanded. Recent films include GIRAFFE, LE PRINCE and OUTSIDE NOISE. Additionally she works as a lecturer for cinematography at various film- and artschools. She lives in Berlin.
© Matze Börner

Elen Lotman

Elen Lotman has shot numerous feature films, documentaries and shorts. For various film projects she has travelled to Japan, Tibet, China, Thailand, India, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Lapland and Russian Arctic Kola Peninsula. Her films have won awards and have been shown in competition programs of IDFA, Tampere Film Festival, Black Nights Film Festival, Camerimage Film Festival etc. She has defended a PhD about cinematographers’ experiential heuristics and established interdisciplinary neurocinematic research in Baltic Film and Media School. She is a co-president of the International Federation of Cinematographers IMAGO and mother to three citizens of the world.
© Heikki Leis