My Sister in the Time of Hunting 

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The project began with a living situation, then it began with characters. Finding ourselves in a remote farmhouse on Dartmoor we began to make a film about two girls, Edith and Artemis, incestuous sisters abandoned in an old house, in whose lives there were fragments of our own. 

 

We built sets in which the characters could live, by assembling objects we built their imaginative world. For four months, from late March to mid-May and from July to the end of August, we spent much of our time in character or making up stories about the sisters: their interests, fears, dreams. In the end we came to closely identify with Edith and Artemis who we felt to be ghosts who had come to us so that their lives might be revived for as long as we played them. 

 

We used film to shape and document the project: the characters, the sets in which we lived, and the landscape of Dartmoor. We found film to be the best medium for preserving this kind of expanded acting because footage can be taken consistently over long periods of time. 

 

Working in this way allowed us to explore ideas about the imagination, about acting, and about the world of the divine, the ‘other world’ or the ‘invisible’ as the writer and mythographer Roberto Calasso has described it. 

 

The world of the sisters is made out of stories, imagined futures, contradictory biographies as one sees in the lives of the gods who, in their immortality, have garnered so many accounts of their actions that the same gesture might be reflected in any number of stories, each a little different from the one that came before it.  Edith and Artemis might have lived many times before, one life playing out as an echo of another, or like ripples spreading across the surface of a lake. The sleeping and waking lives of the sisters are stalked by strange characters: the sinister Master of the Animals, the Dead Hunter, Pierrot and Columbine. They come from the world of the unseen, from the world of the forest, from the sky, from the stage, from the other side of wakefulness.

 

We hope you enjoy it.