Acclaimed visual artist and filmmaker Cléa van der Grijn introduces The Disembodied Adventures of Alice, her unique take on Louis Carroll's classic Alice In Wonderland, which screens at the Bloomsday Film Festival this June.
I am a visual artist, who also makes film. The Disembodied Adventures of Alice, like my films before it, come from deep inside.
I became suspicious of safe narrative. It felt like an oppression, like I was hiding behind some manicured facade because I was afraid of the images that were boiling inside me, images which I was unable to articulate through my painting.
Having spent a long period of time in hospital for my mental health, I learned to be more transparent and brave to write stories that were authentic to my experience.
Bloomsday Film Festival this June
My stories are visual, entangled, mutilated. My work has to reflect life as I see and experience it.
My stories are visual, entangled, mutilated. My work must reflect life as I see and experience it. With The Disembodied Adventures of Alice, I wanted to experience the lovely discomfort and potential danger that comes with attempting something new.
I understood what trauma and the pressure of life does to the human psyche.
Making film filled the emptiness and a hunger. A hunger for more: life is not tidy.
I revisited Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, curious to learn that each of the characters have some form of mental illness or indeed a complexity of many. The caterpillar has drug addiction. The hare suffers acute anxiety. The mad hatter has neurological damage and is quite mad. Alice suffers from hallucinations and personality disorders amongst other things.
Being familiar with mental illness , I was more than capable of visualising my characters. The proximity of hope and sorrow a knife edge away from each other.
I understood what trauma and the pressure of life does to the human psyche.
The screenplay came naturally. Words, paintings, drawings, quotes all evolving to make a whole. There would be opera, song, dance. The film would be beautiful yet psychologically dark. Each detail to be considered, every still to be visually beautiful like a painting.
The international success of my short films Jump and Flux culminated in the Irish Museum of Modern Art purchasing my film and painting as part of its national, permanent collection. I also won a Visual Arts Bursary from the Arts Council.
That means things are busy. A new film project, Elisa in Wonderland which was made possible through the Arts Council of Ireland's Authored Works Award to make an artist-led feature-length film, started filming in April.
Film is expensive to make. A lot of time goes into pre-production. With sales from my paintings, bartering and careful planning, the cast and crew regathered for this new project.
I have worked with the same small team of professionals since the beginning. Cast and crew make up less than 10 people, each creative is multi- talented bringing so much more than I could ever imagine. Trust and loyalty are paramount.
We work extremely hard and invest a lot of ourselves into these film projects. My greatest achievement is that we have grown together, and never swayed off course.
In March, we won Best Feature film at New Jersey Film Festival and picked up a Best Festival Director Citation for cinematography, led by my colleague, the Sligo-based cinematographer and filmmaker Ciaran Carty. The Disembodied Adventures of Alice was also cited for Best Director, Best Screenwriter, Best Production Design and Best Performance (Senna O Hara). We also won a Remi award from Houston World Fest.
Fittingly, on St. Patrick’s weekend we screened our film as part of the Contemporary Irish Arts Centre (CIACLA) Irish Film Festival Los Angeles, in Laemmle Santa Monica Film Centre cinema. The film was just one of eight feature-length films selected for screening at the festival.
The Disembodied Adventures of Alice has its Irish premiere on Sunday June 16th in the IFI (Irish Film Institute) as part of Bloomsday Festival, Dublin
This is such a validation for an unconventional piece of work, and I am immensely proud.
Find out more about this year's Bloomsday Film Festival programme here.
