(2021-2023)
Fern Silva (USA) is a Portuguese-American filmmaker who studied film at the Massachusetts College of Art and Bard College. He began working as an editor and camera operator in NYC in the early 2000s. Silva’s early films revolved around his relationship to Portugal and have since expanded, underlining the influence of industry on culture and the environment. For over a decade his work has screened widely in festivals, museums, and cinematheques internationally, including at five editions of Media City Film Festival; the Toronto, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, New York, London, Melbourne, and Hong Kong International Film Festivals; MOMA PS1; New Museum; Anthology Film Archive; Harvard Film Archive; and the Gene Siskel Film Center. He is the recipient of an Ann Arbor Film Festival Gus Van Sant Award, the Grand Prix from 25FPS Festival (Zagreb), and most recently the Agora Post-Production Award from the Thessaloniki International Film Festival. Silva’s work has been featured in publications including Cinema Scope, Filmmaker, and Film Comment. He’s taught filmmaking at various institutions including the University of Illinois at Chicago, Bard, and Bennington College, and has received support from the Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, MacDowell, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He was an MCFF Mobile Frames Filmmaker in Residence to complete Wayward Fronds (2015). Rock Bottom Riser, his first feature, had its world premiere at the Berlinale (2021) and received a jury citation. Concurrent with his Chrysalis Fellowship, Silva is a fellow at the Film Study Center at Harvard University. He lives and works in Athens, Greece.
Rooted in histories of experimental film and ethnography, Fern Silva’s works are sensuous, polyvocal montages of people and places, the natural and unnatural worlds. Silva uses his own field recordings, clips from widely viewed films, and footage from obscure or pedestrian broadcast sources to upend the progressive linearity of conventional storytelling in a move toward narrative disorder; he does this by surfacing various historical moments within more contemporary ones and venturing into narratives of darkness, destruction, and the paranormal. Some of Silva’s films render specific geographical locations as speculative realities, blending fictitious and real aspects of their social and cultural histories, while others are atmospheric and surreal, foregrounding the playfulness and rigor of Silva’s associative strategies. —Alicia Ritson
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