The Mels

(Documentary Film)

An artist recasts major changes in her life as deaths, seeking to change how individuals think about their lives and the lives of others.

A Film by Sharon Kleiman, Jason Harward and Daniela Lubezki. (2022)

Vitta is an experimental film about my current state- and the current state of the world (2020 pandemic). I want to illustrate how the time of coronavirus has made us come back to the body, and how we navigate the world with respect to our bodies. I use clips of myself dancing and my shadows to depict this heightened state of awareness with our physical bodies. It has also made me come back to the very elemental aspects of life, and reconnect with my surroundings in a very still, prolonged, way. In my walks, I find myself staring at things in a more present, amplified way- reconnecting to nature and its modes of expression as if they were and extension of myself. “Your body is not separate from the universe, because at quantum mechanical levels there are no well-defined edges. You are like a wiggle, a wave, a fluctuation, a convolution, a whirlpool, a localized disturbance in the larger quantum field. The larger quantum field—the universe—is your extended body.” This flow in stillness and heightened state of awareness has also brought me into thinking of the collective consciousness, and the boundless unity in everything. This time is confusing, uncertain, and nonlinear, and I want the film to echo that. It has also made come back to places that like they belong to a different time, making me think of spaces and their infinity and the cyclical nature of life and facing my “shadows” and past habits, or reverting to things that felt very unique to past versions of myself.

A film by Sharon Kleiman. (2020)