Ráj

A young woman's artful look at the spirituality and memories of Jewish women living in post-communist Prague. 1996 Winner Judah Magnus Museum Video Competition.

Born 1972, Mineapolis, Minnesota, USA. Sarah Jane Lapp's first film, "Bitul: Gaella 1994," a short conversation with a young woman from Zagreb, Croatia was screened in the 1995 Women in the Director's Chair Series, Walker Art Center, Mineapolis, Minnesota, USA. This "accidental" film represented a departure from her previous work on the stage and at the easel. Lapp holds a B.A. from Brown University in Honors Playwriting/Screenwriting where she studied with writers Paula Vogel, Aishah Rahman, and Shay Youngblood, and with filmmaker Tom Kalin. Her plays have been produced by Brown University and excerpts published by Heinemann, Ltd. Lapp studied writing with Arnost Lustig on a Prague Summer Writer's Workshop Scholarship; film and animation on a 1995 J. William Fulbright Fellowship at the Academy of Performing Arts, Film & Television Faculty in Prague, Czech Republic. Lapp most recently finished an animation commission for Mäntan Elokuvaviikko in cooperation with Studio Bratri v Triku in Prague, Czech Republic and will return to the Czech Republic with "MIMO" partner (see below), Jenny Perlin, to film a document on the gesture of joke among war survivors as part of an Artslink project. You may find Lapp (shown in the photos above behind the tripod) at the Art Institute of Chicago or by mail at 12840 11th Avenue North, Plymouth, Minnesota 55441 USA Tel: 1-612-544-4030 Fax: 1-612-338-5815 DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT "RÁJ" ("EDEN") This film attempts to reconstruct an interview done with journalist Natasa Dudinska -- an interview done on the fly, with neither Nagra nor Eclair to be found. With a journal and a demented tape recording as original documents, I attempted to illustrate Dudinska's Holocaust associations with my own animation and narrative about the local train station. One young woman asks: does the swallowing of the aggressive act -- be it accidental or intentional -- determine our possibility for paradise? This film derives from a desire to understand how Jewish women in Prague "reconstructed" their spirituality after the Velvet Revolution; how they used or did not use ancient ritual, memory, faith to rebuild from the profaned. The sister films "RÁJ" ("EDEN") and "MIMO" ("BEYOND", discussed below), which subsequently evolved from my research, reflect the difficulty experienced in documenting the ephemeral, the highly personal, and the holiness I often encountered behind the locked vestiges of cemeteries and ideology alike. These different planes of reality seemed accessible on film only by combining the straightforward with the super-subjective -- memories exchanged between Jews from opposite sides of the ocean. - SARAH JANE LAPP SCREENINGS "RÁJ" ("EDEN") July 1996 16th Annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival San Francisco's Castro Theatre and at the UC Berkeley Theatre May 1996 Kongresove Centrum, Prague, Czech Republic. Premiered at FAMU Festival -- Competition category. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT "MIMO" ("BEYOND") "MIMO" ("BEYOND") Czech Republic, 1996, 16mm, 15 min., color and black & white, English & Czech, English, Hebrew w/Eng. subtitles. Produced in conjunction with the J. William Fulbright Commission. Part documentary, part memory exchange of two sojourners in a strange land: Behind the locked vestiges of a cemetery in Zizkov, Prague, childhood marbles descend onto tombstone marble, inducing song and strangely intersecting spiritualities. "MIMO" which is perhaps simply a celluloid gift for my elderly neighbor who stars in it, will either be seen as very obtuse or very--I don't what. SCREENINGS "MIMO" ("BEYOND") October-December 1996 Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley, CA, USA: 3 months exhibition and daily screenings. First place in the Judah L. Magnes Museum competition -- experimental/personal journey category. August 1996 Mäntan Elokuvaviikko 1st Film Festival in Mänttä, Finland June 1996 Pacific Film Archive of the University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA, USA May 1996 Kongresove Centrum, Prague, Czech Republic, Premiered in FAMU Festival -- Competition category.