Matthias Von Braun's haunting MACHINE hits streaming (NEWS)
Award-winning dark surrealist filmmaker Matthias Von Braun brings short film MACHINE to streaming from today. His short films have been screened at renowned art galleries, and film festivals around the world.
MACHINE is a dark surreal nightmare set deep underground in a post-human automated factory where a bio-mechanical android bursts from her artificial fetal sac. She discovers her body and rejects her sexuality.
The film stars Melanie Whitehead Smith, a London-based dance artist with a passion for interdisciplinary work. Her practice centres predominantly around dance and recorded media. She is currently exploring the intersections between movement and film.
The gripping short can be watched in full below and Von Braun's stark visuals compressed into the haunting orchestral piece is both mesmerising and haunting.
In January Von Braun will be making a larger-scale dark surreal short with performers Lilith Newson and Arthur Griffiths called IMPRENATABLE.
Lilith Newson is a performance artist and model whose practice revolves around expression using the body, and artist personas. Over the years their body of work has consisted of live and video performances exploring self-love, trauma, non-binary identity, and glamouring. Often at the forefront of their work is an expression of sexuality, gender identity, and body politics in a contemporary context, the translation of intimacy onto digital platforms, and achieving transcendent states by means of the body. Alongside their own practice, they explore the position of the muse, the abstraction of identity through modification, and how other artists' interpretations of their body all confront us with the reality of illusion.
Through their art, Arthur Griffiths tries to create a space that allows each of us greater access to the collective spirit which permeates all experiences. By evoking honesty, communication, and raw self-expression they are an active part of the convergence between the material, ego, and the shared abstract realms of imagination and possibility. As an actor, they have worked with directors such as Sam Mendes, Danny Boyle, Steven Spielberg, and Tom Hanks. As a musician, they have recorded two albums with a third underway. As a photographer they have been published by the Guardian, and as a poet been appraised by world-renowned poet Dermot Bolger. They constantly strive to communicate truth with the external world and delve deeper into the mythical passageways of their own understanding.