Glimpses from a Visit to Orkney in Summer 1995 (2020)
Ute Aurand
Glimpses from a Visit to Orkney in Summer 1995 Ute Aurand Germany16mm > digital4.5 min2020
In Aurand’s signature diaristic form—and rendered through her expressive Bolex movements—roses in bloom, farm animals, Orkney landscapes, and late filmmaker Margaret Tait having tea are punctuated with abstract swaths of saturated and shifting colors which are also captured by her active camera. – NYFF
The thing about poetry is you have to keep doing it.
People have to keep making it.
The old stuff is no use
Once it’s old.
It comes out of the instant
And lasts for an instant.
Take it now
Quickly
Without water.
There!
Tomorrow they’ll be something else.
–Margaret Tait, “Now”
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with This Long Century.
Image credits: all artworks, stills, and portraits courtesy of the artist © Ute Aurand.
about the artist
Ute Aurand (Germany) is an artist, filmmaker, and curator born in Frankfurt in 1957. She is recognized as one of the most significant filmmakers working in the traditions of film diary and portraiture today. Aurand has said of her practice: “The source of inspiration is daily life, the fountain which never stops and offers itself to everyone. It is a great joy and challenge to transform my inner dialogue into film.” She graduated from the DFFB–German Film and Television Academy (1985). She has completed 40+ films since 1985, including Paul Celan liest (1985), Am Meer (1995), Der Schmetterling im Winter (2006), in die Erde gebaut (2008), To Be Here (2013), and Rushing Green with Horses (2019), which have been widely exhibited in museums, galleries, and festivals internationally, including Tate Modern, Austrian Film Museum, Berlinale, New York Film Festival, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Anthology Film Archives, Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions, Harvard Film Archive, Berkeley Museum of Art and Pacific Film Archive, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Courtisane Festival, National Gallery of Art (Washington), Flaherty Seminar, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Punto de Vista Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, and eight previous appearances at Media City Film Festival. She was recipient of MCFF’s Grand Prize (2008). Aurand has taught at the HFBK University of Fine Arts Hamburg, University of the Arts Bremen, and Zürich University of the Arts. She founded the Bolex Workshop at DFFB–German Film and Television Academy (2015). She is a subject of the recent monograph Ute Aurand, Helga Fanderl, Jeannette Muñoz, Renate Sami, published by Punto de Vista Festival to coincide with major surveys of the artists’ work (2020). For 40+ years, she has worked as a curator, organizing retrospective programs with a particular focus on female filmmakers, including Marie Menken, Margaret Tait, Maria Lang, and Utako Koguchi, among others. She was co-founder of the screening collective FilmSamstag (Film Saturday), together with Renate Sami and Theo Thiesmeier (1997–2007). She lives and works in Berlin, Germany with her partner, the American filmmaker Robert Beavers.