Savage Witches World Premiere

By Daniel Fawcett & Clara Pais

As regular readers of One+One you will no doubt be aware that we have recently completed our new feature film Savage Witches. It has been 18 months since we had the first conversation in which we came up with the idea for this project and the film is now having its World Première this Friday at the Cambridge film festival.

Savage Witches was born out of our love for the art of Cinema and a desire to make a film in which we felt creatively free, cinema as exploration as opposed to making a product from a set of pre-determined designs. We started with a few fixed points which we knew would remain and we protected these so as not to lose sight of our purpose. One was that the film would follow the narrative of ideas over story or plot – we wanted to be able to move freely between images and moments without being restricted by what would be believable or even acceptable to convention. The other was that this exploration of freedom would use and respond to the people and situations that we encounter throughout production – we would explore obstacles, accidents and inspirations in equal measure and let these become a source of material for the film. Even though we started with a script, which served as a rough map of the territory we wished to explore, it was quickly abandoned – a map can only serve as a starting point for this kind of adventure and conveys little of the reality of being out in the wilderness.

What we have ended up with is a playful, poetic and experimental film about two teenage girls, Gretchen and Margarita, who want nothing but to play games, dress up and have adventures, but when they find themselves in conflict with the world around them they set out to transform it and break free! The film attempts to satisfy all their wishes for freedom, and they are aided by a magic key which unlocks the film, allowing process to mix with its creation, artifice and reality to intermingle. But when Gretchen and Margarita are confronted with reality, it becomes clear that there is a vast gap between what they say they want and what they really want. However, once the game has been set in motion they are swept along in the film’s momentum and have to see it through to the end.

Savage Witches is a colourful collage of sounds and images that has been created using all manner of processes and formats from VHS and Super 8 to drawn animation and hand-coloured frames, resulting in a bold and expressionistic exploration of the art of cinema.

The world première of Savage Witches is taking place at 7:30pm on Friday 21st September as a part of the Cambridge Film Festival.

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