Emma is an Australian filmmaker and multi-media artist based between Colombia and London. She studied under acclaimed Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr at his film.factory in Sarajevo where she received her MFA in filmmaking. Her debut feature-length film, PAPAGAJKA (The Parrot) had its World Premiere at the South by Southwest [SXSW] Film Festival and the Sarajevo Film Festival and continued on to a successful festival run worldwide. Emma’s moving image works have been selected for over 200 festivals and exhibitions worldwide and won several awards. She is an alumnus of the Torino Film Lab, Berlinale Talents, the Berlinale Short Film Station and the Reykjavík Talent Lab. Emma is in post-production on her 2nd narrative feature film, EL VAQUERO, and has just completed a three-channel experimental film based on Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.
I explore the ephemeral side of human nature – the emotion, creation and destruction.
As a filmmaker and video artist, my work combines different techniques and narrative structures for existential discussions on psychology and human folly. A strong sense of aesthetic stylization frames my ideas. I create symbolic puzzles. My desire is to disrupt viewer expectations and defy genre expectations. Playful undertones of absurdism within my work reveals my love for lateral thinking and a strength of imagination. My narrative film work tends towards character-based stories and magic-realism. Fascinated by moral ambiguity and heightened-drama, my practice usually delves into these realms – creating worlds that symbolically externalize the inner-psychology of character.
