CAMERA OBSCURA: AMY HALPERN IN MEMORIAM
ONLINE
Camera Obscura is an online programme that was launched in 2020 as a response to the global situation. Its format emulated that of the famous Screening Room led by Robert Gardner, who through American public television summoned the brightest personalities in experimental cinema to talk about their work and show selected pieces. We are recovering Camera Obscura with the intention of honouring a filmmaker who has left an indelible mark on the history of the festival and on our lives: Amy Halpern, who sadly passed away in August 2022. Her cinema, with its undeniable sensitivity, subtlety and intelligence, leads us through mysterious terrains merging symbolism, synaesthesia, sensory nature and particular mises-en-scène where the poetic and the political come together. Halpern, who participated from Los Angeles in Camera Obscura that same 2020, visited us in 2022 to bring us two cathartic sessions and a master class. Now we are recovering the interview we held with her in A Coruña about her masterpiece Falling Lessons, as well as material from the presentations and talks in her master class on the use of sound in her cinema. Furthermore, we interviewed her partner and collaborator, the filmmaker David Lebrun, a tireless champion of her legacy, and Mark Toscano, in charge of preserving Halpern’s work. As the climax, the programme will include one of her films. This is a tribute to a filmmaker who has not yet been sufficiently acknowledged; one of those cases in which artistic quality merges with human quality, in tune with the spirit that the festival intends to uphold.
Photos: María Meseguer
Ten festivals ago I found my home in (S8): the home of peripheral filmmakers. I began working at this festival because of my love for cinema; I stayed because of my love for what happens there on a human level: the Mostra is an event that attracts very special people from all over the world, both artists and the audience. They are people who are like curious children, sweet aliens who spend most of their lives feeling out of place, and they arrive in A Coruña with a thirst for human connection to share what their sensitivities need to exchange and, in doing so, to heal themselves.
When Amy arrived at the 2022 festival, everyone on the team felt a strong, immediate connection with her. There are people who, as soon as you meet them, switch something on inside you that will never go out. That was Amy: a flash of light. Seeing her Falling Lessons, misunderstood at its US premiere in ‘92, seeing what it meant for her to present it to the (S8) audience and then its highly acclaimed reception showed that we had made a long-awaited act of justice possible. It was something big and magical. A very powerful, collective catharsis.
When that session was over, everyone in the hall wanted to thank her for the generosity of that masterpiece. Amy was overwhelmed. She walked across the hall through shows of affection until she reached the back, next to me. I told her that her film was a balm, that it had healed us all. She cried in my arms and murmured, “Now I can die happy.”
That’s why, when she passed away just two months later, I felt compelled to gather up all the pictures that attest to what happened here to share it with the hundreds (if not thousands) of people around the world who met and instantly loved Amy. This is another act of justice: this time, a personal one. It is my gratitude for that embrace, which passed on to me a courage and generosity that changed my life.
Nela Fraga