HELEN BENIGSON

About

This short project will see Helen using the space and time to test ideas for recent film projects, TALMY, which premiered at the UK Jewish Film Festival in November 2012, and The Heavy Wait. Talmy tells the story of a Jewish woman, Thelma Syzmson Koorland, born in 1936 in Poland. The film traces her early life in Warsaw, Paris and later Cape Town. At the age of seven, Thelma's parents were killed in the Warsaw Ghetto and this marked the beginning of her lone journey through bitter winters, hiding in haystacks, false identities and living with different families. The film replays and renegotiates Thelma's narrative, through recent interviews with her daughter and the objects and paintings that she has collected. At MEANTIME, Helen will test out different configurations of the film, cutting the footage, layering and projecting it in different ways, drawing out the narrative through installation and timing, negotiating the slippages between memory, time, geography and language. During the screening event, Helen will perform the soundtrack live, a cello score Kol Nidrei, originally played by Jacqueline Du Pre.