Residency

Filmmaker Winnie Cheung appears as one of ten female multi-disciplinary creatives invited to participate in the Locker Room’s second annual residency founded by artist Samara Bliss in this haunting metafictional docu-horror. The scene is deep winter Brooklyn, a multi-level home typical of the burrow, with slightly dishevelled yet kaleidoscopic interiors that add flavour to the collective productivity. Cheung’s camera increasingly provokes her subjects while playing with audience perception, interchanging between a sense of freedom summoned through creative expression and community juxtaposed against the rising tension anticipated in hybrid work-living experiences. Although the artists are free to leave the space, there is a sense of confinement and self-restraint as each artist is pushed to their limits, stifled by the pressure that comes with creation. Inspired by DIY Punk cinema, Residency recalls Richard Lowenstein’s Dogs in Space (1986) or Gaspar Noé's Climax (2018), where the absence of natural light illuminates the fusion of colours, shapes, movements and sounds generated by the omnipresent creative flow, inducing a hallucinogenic and transient experience where practice and exhibition are in constant flux. (International Film Festival Rotterdam)