It begins with a carefully composed shot of a couple struggling with their emotions after some kind of quarrel. A young woman is sitting and crying tears of black mascara while a young man stands silently, stunned, in the corner of their messed up room. His motionless reflection in one of the room’s mirrors contrasts with an image of an old lady moving in the second one. Cut to a brief close-up of the crying woman that bleeds into a shot in the same room but with an elderly couple moving in slow motion in unison while the man’s reflection in both mirrors begins to walk away. Cut to a shot of the old lady looking pensively into a space outside of the frame. Cut to a long take of a young girl walking into a club where she meets a young boy who will become the love of her life.
This is just the beginning of a bittersweetly beautiful and symbolic eight-minute long music video to Justin Timberlake’s Mirrors that presents one couple’s relationship through three separate timelines melded together to show the joys, the heartbreaks, the regrets and the soul-searching of two people sharing a life together. Its director, the legendary Italian-Canadian filmmaker and photographer Floria Sigismondi, will join us in Toruń this November to talk about her career and accept EnergaCAMERIMAGE Award for Directing Achievements in the Field of Music Videos.
From her early years Floria Sigismondi was drawn to the idea of expressing her thoughts and emotions through the power of carefully crafted imageries, thus she started her professional career as a fashion photographer. This was not nearly enough for her creative spirit and soon she began her lifelong adventure with the moving images, first in the music videos industry and then directing feature films and series’ episodes. As she initially worked on a Canadian music scene, shooting for local bands that gave her artistic freedom in visualizing their songs’ lyrics and meanings into multilayered videos, Sigismondi gained a reputation of a true music video auteur. Both in terms of creating a distinct visual style of very dark and emotional, even brutal, images that often go hand in hand with something much more positive or melancholic, and in terms of going out of her way to have as much control over the material as possible, including drawing and designing her own props. She quickly gained enough popularity that she was spotted by bigger brands and artists. Since then Floria Sigismondi had worked with Rihanna, Leonard Cohen, Christina Aguilera, David Bowie, Katy Perry, Sam Smith, Björk, Sigur Rós, Dua Lipa, The White Stripes and Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, among many others.
Yet even though she was a brilliant and innovative music director who never forfeited a chance to reinvent herself and her creative ways, as a storyteller Floria Sigismondi was always drawn to making far more grander and richer cinematic tales. So, without never leaving the realm of music videos that shaped her as an artist, she began her romance with the feature film and TV series industry. Her feature debut, The Runaways, a brilliant film charting the troubled path of 1970s girl rock-and-roll band to stardom, was an instant hit and presented her name to the wider audience. Since then Floria Sigismondi worked mostly for TV and streaming series, shooting episodes of such globally popular shows as horror-filled Hemlock Grove, action-hero extravaganza Daredevil, brutal dystopian drama The Handmaid’s Tale and aesthetically innovative fantasy American Gods, and then returning to feature filmmaking with 2020’s The Turning, a gothic supernatural horror film with a visual twist that perfectly aligned with her artistic sensibilities. Currently she is working on her third feature project, The Silence of Mercy, an independent LGBTQ drama that promises to be both a true Floria Sigismondi film and something quite unique in her career as a visual storyteller.
We always welcome such distinct filmmakers as Floria Sigismondi at EnergaCAMERIMAGE Film Festival and within a worldwide community we strive to create, thus we eagerly await her visit in Toruń to accept EnergaCAMERIMAGE Award for Directing Achievements in the Field of Music Videos and meet our participants to discuss the different ways one can chart their path in the world.
