The work was available on our platform only for the period of the screening.
“Drive with Persephone” (00:10:00) by MiruFiyu (MilleFeuille), Canada, 2018
The ancient myth of the goddess of rebirth’s abduction is told through ‘drive with me vlogs’ and sousveillance. “On closer inspection, the work is so much more, perhaps above all in its compassionate register of the perils and exultations of adolescence, and the wisdom and cruelty of old age. A timely, potent rumination on the enduring, immutable cycle of life and death, MiruFiyu’s video confronts—with a mixture of stoicism and defiant hope—the unmooring of social life in our apparently hyper-connected world.” Greg Cohen, Festival of (In)Appropriation.
Drive with Persephone is part of the feature ‘I Went to a Party Alone’ in which YouTube vlogs of random, daily life are recast as dramatic events imbued with cinematic qualities and mythic allusions. When the hard cuts and juxtapositions reveal a landscape of oppressive social control, the vloggers’ mundane normal soon gives way to the surreal. Seemingly innocuous recordings are fraught with foreboding as the vloggers who yearn for freedom, love and self-expression find themselves unable to escape society’s haunting bondage.
Bio
MilleFeuille’s name references a famous ‘thousand leaves’ pastry whose origin is unknown because like windblown leaves drifting over lands and through time, the ‘thousand leaves’ pastry is an eternal remix. MilleFeuille (aka MiruFiyu) confections pre-existing, found footage into metaphors about banal violence and decadent melancholia. Clips of random daily life are recast as dramatic events imbued with cinematic qualities and mythic allusions. The intention is not to subsume the original footage and its first context into a singular narrative or message, but rather to inhabit the slippery terrain of found-footage multivalence.
Director: MiruFiyu (MilleFeuille)
