film

Other Nations

interdisciplinary performance installation merging dance, music and olfaction, 2024.

X Other Nations

interdisciplinary performance installation merging dance, music and olfaction, 2024.

Creators: Carla Bengtson, in collaboration with choreographer Darion Smith, composer Juliet Palmer, and perfumer Dannielle Sergent
Presenter: Oregon Contemporary, Portland Biennial, April-August, 2024

Through multi-sensory creative forms Other Nations enacts the voicing, sensing, signifying life worlds of other creatures while shining a light on our own animal-related modes of being. We are particularly intrigued by ways of seeing, sounding, hearing, moving and smelling that slip the perceiver and the perceived between visibility and invisibility. In the bigger picture, we are curious to see whether we can learn to navigate through the noise of human existence to a deeper attentiveness to other living beings.

Other Nations: video, 2024

Dance by Darion Smith. Videography by Steven Myat. Vocal score by Juliet Palmer in collaboration with Lieke van der Voort, Andrea Kuzmich, Jackson Welchner and Elizabeth Lima. Recording engineer: Jean Martin.

Choreographer Darion Smith and composer Juliet Palmer invite ground squirrel, coyote and rattlesnake to flow through the human body as movement and vocalization. Moving then sounding, the singers responded to three choreographic sketches by Darion Smith. Unaware of the animals they were channeling, their voices betray an intuitive, embodied connection to the more-than-human. Dancing between traffic, grass, concrete, and water, Smith underscores the illusory separation between human and more-than-human beings, nature and culture.

Photos: Mario Gallucci

 

Visiting Ben Shemen

animated documentary by Miriam Harris [16:00] 2022.

X Visiting Ben Shemen

animated documentary by Miriam Harris [16:00] 2022.

A collage still from an animated film: an older woman gestures in front of a painting of two girls ina still life art class.front

Credits: direction Miriam Harris; score Juliet Palmer
Funder: 
Creative New Zealand

Select screenings: SHIFT Film Festival, CineSud; New Media Film Fest, LA; Jewish Film Festival, UK; Documentary Edge, NZ; Antimatter Media Arts Festival; Indie Shorts Awards NY; Rising of Lusitania AnimaDoc Film Festival; NCCC Film & Animation Festival; Oregon Documentary Film Festival; T.O. International Women’s Film Fest; The Women’s Film Festival, Phuong Nguyen;

Awards: Best Composer, T.O. International Women’s Film Fest; Best Documentary Award, New Media Film Fest, LA; Best Non-Fiction Winner, Short to the Point International Short Film Festival; First Prize, Documentary, NCCC Film & Animation Festival; Best Documentary Short Film, Hamburg Indie Fest; Best Short Documentary, Art Film Awards, Skopje, Macedonia.

Synopsis: In 1946 three Jewish teenagers who had survived the Holocaust met at the Ben Shemen school in Palestine. More than 70 years after, the women, now in their late eighties, recount the unique and healing experience of being at the school.

Capturamos el momento

music video featuring photography by seniors from Without Borders, Without Limits [8:00] 2021.

X Capturamos el momento

music video featuring photography by seniors from Without Borders, Without Limits [8:00] 2021.

Music: Composed and performed by Juliet Palmer with vocalist Mingjia Chen and guitarist/vocalist Alejandra Nuñez.

Video: Juliet Palmer with photography by program participants

Without Borders, Without Limits
Koffler Gallery
Toronto

During the most isolated time of the pandemic, I collaborated with a group of seniors, amateur photographers gathered together by Jessica Dargo Caplan and Without Borders, Without Limits. This was one of the most moving experiences of shared music-making I’ve had, even with the challenges of multilingual online collaboration. The resulting video — CAPTURAMOS EL MOMENTO 我们记录这一时刻 WE CAPTURE THE MOMENT — combines participants’ photo diaries with online movement and a song springing from their creative writing. Such joy in sharing and listening! It reminded me of the profound connections that music and creativity can weave between us. The closeness and mutual care we witnessed were musical touchstones for the two other composers I brought into the mix: Mingjia Chen and Alejandra Nuñez.

TOUR

video installation by Millie Chen featuring an original soundtrack by composer Juliet Palmer [8:54] 2014.

X TOUR

video installation by Millie Chen featuring an original soundtrack by composer Juliet Palmer [8:54] 2014.

TOUR_MillieChen


Credits 
Direction & Camera: Millie Chen
Composer: Juliet Palmer
Sound Engineer & Producer: Jean Martin
Vocalists: Maryem Tollar, Jani Lauzon, Christine Duncan, Andrea Kuzmich
Funders: Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, and Charles Street Video

TOUR is a video installation by Millie Chen featuring an original soundtrack by composer Juliet Palmer. Created in collaboration with producer Jean Martin, the work is at Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery until May 18, 2014. A quiet witness to four sites of genocide (Rwanda, Cambodia, Wounded Knee and Treblinka), the camera travels slowly through vegetation covering the arguably “healed” sites, while four women’s voices form a counterpoint of lullaby and breath. TOUR challenges us with the question: How can we sustain the memory of that which has become invisible?

Researching songs from each site was done “off-location”, mining the collective digital memory. The four songs were chosen for their emotional resonance and their musical fit within the shared sonic space of the soundtrack. The music was created through a process of learning and forgetting, allowing each song to drift and alter. Recording the singers outdoors allowed us to capture subtle vocal shifts as each performer negotiated unfamiliar terrain — the landscape embellishing the song, breath catching and flowing. As each singer walked and sang, my mind drifted to the image of Millie walking over the ground of those four distant sites. Memory beneath our feet.
Warsaw, January 2011

animated film directed by Miriam Harris with composer Juliet Palmer [10:33] 2013.

X Warsaw, January 2011

animated film directed by Miriam Harris with composer Juliet Palmer [10:33] 2013.

Collage image of a waiter in a cafe in 1930s Warsaw

Credits: co-direction (with Miriam Harris) and score (with Jean Martin)
Funder: Creative New Zealand
Screenings: Catskill Mountains Film Festival, New York (Best Animation Award); New Media Film Festival, Los Angeles (Best in the New Media category); Brooklyn Film Festival, New York (Spirit Award); Melbourne International Animation Festival; Dada Saheb Phalke International Film Festival, New Delhi (Special Mention); Animator Festival, Poznan, Poland; New York Independent Film Festival.

This nine and half minute long experimental film is based on a journey artist/animator Miriam Harris made to her war survivor mother’s birthplace of Warsaw, Poland in January 2011. The film shifts between the time and space of her recent journey to Warsaw from Auckland, and the years when her mother enjoyed living in the city with her family, before the trauma and upheaval of WWII. Through an original soundtrack, drawing, collage, and painted and moving image, this poignant film brings to life the experience of a Jewish daughter returning to a place built in her imagination, through stories and recounted memory, and through the new experience of being in Warsaw, long after her mother had fled to make a new life for herself in Auckland.

‘Warsaw, January 2011’ was co-directed by animator/artist Miriam Harris and composer Juliet Palmer, and created in collaboration with Kate Barton and Jean Martin. Live footage filmed in both Warsaw and Auckland co-exists with drawing, collage, old photographs, and puppets, whilst drawing on a rich East European tradition of modernist graphics and animation. The approach to sound is similarly textured, incorporating recordings made on location, twenty-first century experimental compositions, the human voice, pre-war poetry by the Polish Jewish writer Julian Tuwim, and excerpts from the nineteenth century work of Warsaw composer Frédéric Chopin. 

Soaring, Roaring, Diving

animated short directed by Miriam Harris [6:08] 2008.

X Soaring, Roaring, Diving

animated short directed by Miriam Harris [6:08] 2008.

Credits: co-direction (with Miriam Harris) and score (with Jean Martin)
Funder: Creative New Zealand
Screenings: Marfa International Film Festival, Artsfest Film Festival, Los Angeles SSG Summer Shorts Film Festival (USA); In the Palace International Film Festival, Bulgaria; XII Brooklyn International Film Festival, NY; Fest Anca Animation Festival, Slovakia; New Zealand International Film Festival; Kansk International Film Festival, Siberia; Antimatter Film Festival, Vancouver; St John’s Women’s International Film Festival, Newfoundland; Tehran International Short Film Festival; Cambofest International Independent Film Festival, Cambodia; Byron Bay International Film Festival, Australia; Mediawave Film Festival, Hungary

Award: Best Experimental Film, Brooklyn International Film Festival (2009)

slip

experimental dance short [6:00] 2008.

X slip

experimental dance short [6:00] 2008.

Funder: Bravo!
Credits: composer (with Jean Martin) and performer, director Chelsea McMullen, choreographer Yvonne Ng, cinematographer Maya Bankovic
Screenings: Toronto International Short Film Festival, Cinedans (Amsterdam), Dance Camera West (Los Angeles), Loikka Dance Film Festival (Finland) to the International Dance and Electronic Media Festival (Mexico City)

Awards: Best Experimental Short and Kodak Award for Best Cinematography at Toronto International Short Film Festival (2010)