Red-carpet ride for Clara

May 24, 2005
Director Van Sowerwine and producer Philippa Campey picked up a special mention in Cannes for their animated film Clara.

Photo: Christian Joergensen

A love affair with dolls has earned a Melbourne animator a special mention at Cannes, writes Stephanie Bunbury.

She might be almost 30, but Van Sowerwine is still playing with dolls. Which is just as well considering it has just earned the short filmmaker a special mention at Cannes. Something about their blank faces, says the director of the animated film Clara, sets her imagination racing.

"You can almost project more emotion on to a doll," she says enthusiastically, "because it's outside you. It is this being that just sits there, with this expression that never changes, so I find myself making up stories for dolls and wondering about their internal lives."

Clara, for example, is a story of bereavement and recovery entirely acted out by dolls and set in a dolls' house and garden. It was shown at the weekend as part of the Cannes Film Festival, where it was in competition for the short film Palme D'Or.

Clara was one of nine films selected from 2500 submitted from around the world for the competition: the impossible dream for most directors.

Just three weeks before the festival, the producer Philippa Campey was told the film had been accepted. Then it was a mad rush to transfer the film from video to 35-millimetre film and organise their time so that they could come to Cannes.

There were also frocks to consider. They had heard horror stories of directors being refused entry to their own films because they were not dressed glamorously enough to grace the Palais' red carpet.

"But people aren't as glamorous as I expected," says Sowerwine. "I mean the stars are glamorous, but the general population on the red carpet - I was expecting more ball dresses, bigger frocks, bright colours."

It was unnerving, she said, to see her little film on the big screen for the first time.

"But, as the credits started to roll, in fact as the lights dimmed in the cinema, I also felt this tremendous sense of relief because we have been waiting all this time to see it and now the time was finally here. And it was great to see all the other films in competition and realise we're on par with them."

Sowerwine grew up in Fitzroy, the daughter of an American father and a French mother, and studied filmmaking at RMIT. Clara, the first film she has made since graduating, is seven minutes long and took eight months to make, including the construction of Clara herself: just making her hair took several days as each strand was individually attached to her head.

The film is about death, but it is also about that juncture
between childhood and adolescence.

The film is about death, but it is also about that juncture between childhood and adolescence.

Shooting is slow, too: if she is moving, even in a small way, the doll must be shot, moved and reshot 12 times for every second on screen.

"The shoot itself took about 10 weeks and that was 15-hour days, six days a week," she says. "There is just so much work involved. But it's funny, everybody says I must be so patient to be an animator." She isn't at all, she insists. She just likes the way dolls look.

Sowerwine made Clara herself. Less than 30cm tall, with an internal metal armature and a malleable silicone body, Clara looks like an old-fashioned toy, but can be moved between shots to reproduce movements of the hands, arms and legs quite convincingly.

"She bends in the right places, so she doesn't need to be moulded; the silicone doesn't shape itself in the way clay does. I have made films with plastic dolls, but what I wanted to do with Clara was create something that was in between the real and mechanical."

The sets - a kitchen, an exterior of a little house, a park - are only an arm-span wide. Most of the shoot took place in Campey's office in Johnston Street, Fitzroy, which she shares with several other independent producers. This helped maintain their enthusiasm, because each exhaustive piece of work could be shown to the neighbours as they went along.

"Sometimes, we'd set something up, then run off and get someone else just to say, 'Come and look at the kitchen! It looks so good!'. So it was an exciting time."

Now that they are in Cannes, they find themselves fielding the usual question short filmmakers are asked: when will they make a feature? Animating dolls very slowly, however, is not a technique that lends itself to feature production. It is possible, Sowerwine says, that she could deal with similar themes of childhood in a film with live actors.

"I do get inspired by live action actions, particularly children. I'm interested in childhood and children and all the things that happen in that time because it is such a vivid time in your life."

She remembers early adolescence, she says, as a particularly difficult period.

"The film is about death, but it is also about that juncture between childhood and adolescence when everything gets more complicated."

What are her own memories of playing with dolls as a child? Then, she remembers, she was just averagely interested.

"I used to play schools with my dolls a lot. That is my most vivid memory, getting them all lined up, the teddy bears as well, and playing teacher with them."

If nothing else, this sounds as if there was already a director in the making.


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