Fern Silva
Fern Silva (1982) is an artist and filmmaker who works primarily in 16mm. He studied film at the Massachusetts College of Art and Bard College and is a fellow at the Film Study Center at Harvard University. His early films centered on his relationship to Portugal and have since expanded, underlining the influence of industry on culture and the environment. For over a decade, his 16mm films have been screened widely in festivals, museums, and cinematheques including the Media City, Toronto, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, New York, London, Melbourne, and Hong Kong International Film Festivals, MOMA PS1, Anthology Film Archive, and the Harvard Film Archive. He’s taught filmmaking at various institutions including the University of Illinois at Chicago, Bard College, and Bennington College. Silva’s short film The Watchmen was presented at BFMAF 2017 and his film Rock Bottom Riser, as a work in progress debut feature, was part of BFMAF’s 2020 inaugural Previews programme, newly renamed for BFMAF 2021 as our Work in Progress strand.
Join Ilona Jurkonytė, curator of the programme Ultramarine: The Sea as Political Space and Artistic Director of the Kaunas International Film Festival, Lithuania, for an informal discussion.
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A dive, the midday sunlight filtering down through the water. The air in
her lungs has to last until she can dislodge the abalone. Dives like
these have been carried out in Japan for over 2000 years by the Ama-San, that literally translates “women of the sea”.
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An essay in five parts, Evaporating Borders offers a series of vignettes, poetically guided by the filmmaker’s curious eye and personal reflections. Through the people she encounters along the way, the film dissects the experience of asylum seekers in Cyprus : A PLO activist and exile from Iraq is denied asylum within 15 minutes; neo-nazi fundamentalists roam the streets in an attack on Muslim migrants; activists and academics organize an antifascist rally and clash with the neo-nazis; 195 migrants drown in the Mediterranean.
