BIO

Posted on June 20, 2009 - Filed Under | 1 Comment

Director Marina Lutz editing her film – © 2007 Katrina Beale

BIOGRAPHY

Marina Lutz is the writer, producer, director and editor of the award-winning documentary short The Marina Experiment, which will have its USA television premiere on The Documentary Channel on October 7, 2010. Praised by the highly regarded French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema as “…eighteen extraordinary and exciting minutes…rarely has found footage revealed so many intimate issues,” they compared her film to Yoko Ono’s Rape and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom.

Spain’s most important cinematic event, the Donostia-San Sebastián International Film Festival, has invited The Marina Experiment to screen as part of their thematic retrospective of contemporary non-fiction cinema, where it will be in the company of films by Werner Herzog and Lars von Trier. This festival is considered to be among the four most important film festivals in the world alongside Cannes, Berlin and Venice. The Marina Experiment has been featured at more than 30 film festivals worldwide, from the high profile Mill Valley Film Festival, which has an impressive track record for launching the careers of new filmmakers, to the alternative Melbourne Underground Film Festival, which supports filmmakers who operate outside established film industry infrastructures. The film has been included in various festivals that promote the importance of the contribution of women in the development of audiovisual creation, as well as several international human rights film festivals. The Marina Experiment has garnered eight awards so far, including Best Documentary, Best Short Film and Best Screenplay.

After The Marina Experiment was nominated as an official selection in the LAB competition of the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, the largest and most prestigious short film festival in the world, Marina found herself with a premiere theatrical screening at Forum des Images in Paris. The Marina Experiment has been invited back to Clermont-Ferrand in 2011 for the 10th anniversary of the LAB competition, where the film will screen in both Clermont-Ferrand and Valence, France. In Spring 2011, The Marina Experiment will be shown theatrically by Cinéma Apollo in Châteauroux, France as part of a highlighted program using film archives to explore the concept of memory through the film medium.

The Marina Experiment was included in a group show at the Wimbledon College of Art, which has a long and distinguished history as one of London’s major art institutions. The film has distracted passersby as a window installation at the Chair and the Maiden gallery in New York and appeared at Tabakalera in San Sebastian, Spain, an International Contemporary Culture Centre specialized in visual arts. The Death Be Kind gallery in Melbourne, Australia published stills from the The Marina Experiment accompanied by Marina’s writing in The Memorial, a catalogue of texts that captures the personal meaning behind the objects we inherit from the deceased and how these material possessions remain important in memory-making.

Marina has accompanied The Marina Experiment to several universities including The Sorbonne where she spoke to the film students about her creative process; the film will be screened there again as part of a lecture that examines the psychology of perversion. The Marina Experiment was shown at The Center for Neural Science at NYU, for a lab whose work is focused on how traumatic memories are formed, stored, and retrieved and Marina is scheduled to speak at Bryn Mawr this November, for a course entitled “Identification in the Cinema” about the ways that the self is defined in and through images.

Marina has said “I suppose by unleashing my pain in public it is helping me with ‘my life’s work,’ which I think is about survival. The filmmaking is just a side effect.”

FILMOGRAPHY

This is Marina’s first film.

Comments

One Response to “BIO”

  1. David Scharff on July 1st, 2009 10:53 pm

    Marina Marina!
    I just watched this with fascination and horror.
    Never quite realized the extent of your experience growing up. Philip told me about the screening and then pointed me here. I just wanted to congratulate you for surviving and completing this work. It is a very important piece in the literature of abuse that I think should be seen by everyone who has survived abuse and everyone who is planning on having children.
    BIG LOVE TO YOU!

    David

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