Artistic Documentary Project Seeking Therians & Otherkin

MarieElisaScheidt-DocumentaryVampire Community News (VCN) is passing this media solicitation along to those in the Therian and Otherkin Communities who may be interested in participating:


Dear Therians and Otherkins,

My name is Elisa and I’m a film student from Munich, Germany. I’m looking for open-minded people who would like to be part in an artistic documentary project, my first feature-length film called “Seven curls for the untamed”. My current research is on the borderline between human and animal nature, and I’m looking for stories of people who feel connected with their animal nature, of men and women who live and even play with their inner wild side. The project encompasses otherkin culture, modern dance, rewilding projects and people who live off the grid. I don’t want to make a documentary that explains what all those concepts mean and how they relate, but I want to make a semi-fictional film that will crystallize the process of and desire for being wild and will combine the real and the mythical, the visceral and the abstract. I’m thinking about telling those little micro-stories in video loops and connecting them through a spiral-like narrative.

My major inspiration was J. H. Ballard, he writes: “The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.” I’m interested that the idea of “wilderness” as a completely human construction. I’d say that any frontier between human and animal nature is imaginary. We are animals, and the behaviors we deem unique are nothing but “fancy” ritualized animal behaviors. And while this may sound bad for many people, as they’d feel offended to be “compared” with animals, for me i find this thought very comfortable and quite obvious. Even our most complex expressions of love and emotion and science, in the end, have deep and critical animal elements. In part people fail to acknowledge this, I think, because they fail to appreciate the complexities of animal personalities and emotions and minds. they have this distant tv-based perception of animals, and/or are biased by their experience with domestic animals (which have been selected for thousands years to be infantilized in their appearance and behavior), and have no idea how we are the same as those domesticated animals and they are the same as us. The distinction that humans are different because they are rational, or because they are artistic, or etc, is just a monstrous oversimplification of “animal” nature and of art itself, in my opinion.

If you want to know more about my work, check out:
http://www.marieelisascheidt.com

Please email me if you are interested or have any questions.
I would love to get to know you!

Thanks so much and best wishes,

Elisa

mail@marieelisascheidt.com

16 July 2013