Valérie Loewensberg began her career as a filmmaker in 2014 at the National University of Arts in Buenos Aires. As a filmmaker, she constructs stories from a gender perspective with an expressive body aesthetic. Her short films “Camille” (2019) and “Cabe Deseo” (2020) won local awards. Today she is graduating as a director with her short film “Cecilia’s Diary”.

Cecilia’s diary is based on a literary work by Corinna Bille. The author’s sensitivity in narrative construction and poetic expression through a diary seduced me. This is above all the dreamlike perception of the female character with her natural surroundings and the mystery that reigns around this enigmatic relationship that I found very interesting. Cecilia’s daily life, disturbed by her childhood memories and dreams, breaks the boundaries between fantasy and reality and invites us to rediscover the snow. As the tragic story of Ophelia in Hamlet, Cecilia is trying to escape social mandates. When it came to transferring the story to an audiovisual treatment, several challenges arose: to which spatio-temporal system does this story belong? How to maintain the poetic expression of the literary text and establish its link with the image while maintaining its enigmatic character?

The ambiguity and sensuality of the elements described are audiovisually interesting: the phantasmagoric body of the protagonist together with the natural bodies refer us to multiple metaphors of sexuality. From the erotic exploration, a psychological tension arises between good and evil, between the feminine and the masculine, which slides diverse rich visual and sonorous possibilities for its transposition to the audiovisual story. In addition, it gives way to explore sensory and poetic effects within an anachronistic and dreamlike atmosphere through the state of mind of the protagonist.

We thought of the space of the clinic and its blurred and ambiguous limits with the outside. We also thought of Cecilia’s enigmatic features through the expression on her face, her flowing hair and her attire. To emphasize the artificiality and discomfort of the protagonist, the interiors of the clinic were imagined colder in texture and color. On the contrary, in the exteriors, where she has more control over her environment, the palette is warmer. In terms of sound, we thought of adding the constant presence of the diary through Cecilia’s voice over. From Cecilia’s sensory and subjective perception, we worked on the exteriors with fine noises where you can hear the snow falling from the branches, the crunching of ice, the flapping of the wings of birds; while in the clinic the sounds will be mixed with an atmosphere of suspense increasingly oppressive, translating Cecilia’s interior. It was thought to add a musical presence to intentionally mark Cecilia’s reverie.