About

Rushing Green with Horses comprises a series of diaristic observations and fascinations filmed over 20 years—a product of the intimate filmmaking practice that Ute Aurand has nurtured since the 1980s. Using her Bolex 16mm camera, she turns her attention to the minutiae of daily life and private encounters. The film emanates with the lives of those around her:

“Anton in his apartment in Lichtenberg, Lilian and Nanouk 10 days old, Jón’s 94th birthday, Sofia dancing, James and Robert transport the 16mm projector, snow at Cape Cod, Detel in her atelier, Franz and Sabrina get married, a trip to Detroit, a stormy sea in black-and-white, Alma and Ernie at the Brandenburger Gate.”

Throughout the film, we “live into” the filmmaker’s world—gaining familiarity with the scenes and the characters in her life. We see several figures at various stages of life, as in Aurand’s shorter works of portraiture (for example, Hanging Upside Down in Branches 2009, Paulina, Franz & Maria 2011). However, her rushing, fleet style withholds too much familiarity. She creates a “spell” that carries from the energy of the life around her into the energy of the image and the edit. The film becomes a cinematic “glass ball (of a good witch) where everything is seen together at the same time–the linearity is gone.” Ephemeral and inebriating, Aurand makes a flowering, fragrant, and abundant presence out of a collage of memories and lost moments –“a child asleep in its own life.”

Ages 15+