Still Voices Short Film Festival

Personal Growth

Personal Growth is a new Super-8 film work by Vicky Langan and Maximilian Le Cain. Over the course of their decade-long filmmaking collaboration, Langan and Le Cain have created an intimate, distinctive universe built on a striking match between Langanʼs magnetic, often troubling and intense presence as a performer and Le Cainʼs hypnotically disruptive visual rhythms. Personal Growth is an enigmatic, fragmented piece that could have been filmed at any point in the past sixty years. It conveys the haunting charge of a privately made home movie of great significance to its creators but unsettlingly mysterious to viewers. Its grainy, black and white texture vividly renders the elemental coastal seascapes where it was filmed.

Director Bio

Vicky Langan is an artist whose practice operates across several often overlapping fields, chiefly sound, performance, and film. Langan both embraces and projects vulnerability, offering an intimate territory loaded with personal symbolism and unguarded emotion. With a focus on the sounds of the body and its functions, involving contact-­miked skin, amplified breath and live electronic manipulation, Langan’s work sits between sound and performance art.

Maximilian Le Cain has made more than ninety short, medium and feature length experimental films and videos over the past decade. He is affiliated with Experimental Film Society. He is currently working in creative partnership with sound/performance artist Vicky Langan. He collaborates with artist Esperanza Collado in the multi-disciplinary art project Operation Rewrite and with composer Karen Power on the sound / film / performance project Gorging Limpet. He is a contributor to the Cinema Cyanide noise project.