In the Mirror of Maya Deren

An unparalleled portrait of an artist in an Austrian documentary: Maya Deren. Born in Kiev in 1917, she helped initiate U.S. avant-garde cinema with only six works; her first film, MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943), a dream that digs deeper and deeper into the unconscious, is considered one of the most influential "underground" films ever made. So far a few facts, so far a few conditions of the myth. IN THE MIRROR OF MAYA DEREN, the documentary portrait by director Martina Kudlácek, approaches the filmmaker in a kind of tightrope walk, on several paths: it knows how to preserve the aura, the fictional about the figure of Derens, who in most of her works was also in front of the camera, but does not lose itself in the homage to an autonomously acting exceptional artist. ISABELLA REICHER

"Martina Kudlácek's In the Mirror of Maya Deren gives voice to the icon of the film avant-garde and brings Maya Deren back from the realm of the dead." MICHAEL OMASTA