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LEMEH42 – Michele Santini & Lorenza Paolini
from Italy
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Interview: 10 questions
1. Tell me something about your life and the educational background
First of all we have to clear that lemeh42 is not a physical person but a couple.
We are Santini Michele and Paoloni Lorenza and we are working together since 2003.
We met at the University in Bologna in 2002. Michele has got a degree in English and Russian Literatures, Lorenza a degree in Fine Arts.
After University we moved back to our city where we are currently living and working.
2. When, how and why started you filming?
We made our first film in the summer of 2003. We were in Lorenza’s grandma old house, a very antique house and soon it came out a story. We wrote a short script we all the indication for the actors, camera movings and for the editino. One week later the film was shot. We made this first film a with a digital camera and made all the animations in Flash.
It was a hard work but we are still satisfied.
3.What kind of subjects have your films?
Unlike other films or filmmakers we come from a literary background plus and influence by the cinema of the seventies (Tarkovsky, Bergman). Our films are stories that we invent, like when we were kids and we invented games, the technique is pretty much the same.
4. How do you develop your films, do you follow certain principles, styles etc?
No, there are no principles or rules we base our judgement of what we see in the camera from the eye of sensation. Even the editing is made experimentally not following a storyline. The viewer has to find a kind of dislocation like in games or dreams where all the rules if still survive are subverted or completely inverted.
5. Tell me something about the technical equipment you use.
A photocamera and two laptops.
6. What are the chances of new media for the genre film/video in general and you personally?
New media have a lot of chances in advertising not in cinema as we intend it.
The most absurd thing of nowadays is that the best ideas are misused to sell stuff and only a bitt of it is applied to movies. If we think of the cinem aexplosion around sixties and seventies we see how in the last decades cinema has become just a new way of tellina the same identical story or if the story is originali s a book or if the idea is original is shooted in a way that the audience make no effort to understand what they see.
7. How do you finance your films?
With our money.
8. Do you work individually as a video artist/film maker or do you work in a team? if you have experience in both, what is the difference, what do you prefer?
See the first answer.
9. Who or what has a lasting influence on your film/video making?
Poetry, music, cartoons and dreams.
10. What are your future plans or dreams as a film/video maker?
To continue in doing it. We are preparing six new works for next year, six video installations based on six short stories to be shown in theatres.
Can works of yours viewed online besides on VideoChannel? Where?
List some links & resources
http://www.cortoweb.it/video150.asp?Video=cwvideolemeh42wastelandwasteland150.asx&ID=393