Join Suzette, our hunted witch as she grapples to understand her own intuitive body. Fearful and avoidant of an inner voice, this movement film takes us on a journey that combines dance and narrative elements that wrap us into this dystopic world. Stones and dust fill our landscape as alive bodies jump out of the screen. Suzette is chased by a group of witches who are hunting her in order for her to realize her own magic powers. Once she does we are drawn into an emotive space where we see deep revelry in her surrender.
Director’s Vision for ‘Witch-Hunt’
Witch-Hunt is a speculative fiction set in a dystopic future where the natural environment has been reduced to dust. The film was conceived during Covid 19 lockdown in a dark and cold factory hall turned community space where I was isolating. My environment was baron and the view of the gates that surrounded the building brought safety while a great sense of the unknown echoed throughout the world.
The film Witch-Hunt was later shot in this same space and revolves around Suzette; a Witch that is hunted because of her denial of the perceived ‘otherness’ that rages within her. Her true feeling sense is buried deep inside of her which draws support from unknown supernatural forces. The world she finds herself in has been depleted of natural resources and she is hunted by a tribe of witches who exist within their own gifted senses. Suzette eventually surrenders to her own power throughout the dance narrative of the film. Through physical performance and crafted composition the film is a coming-of-age tale of a young femme force harnessing her power despite her surroundings.
Building on Silvia Federici’s study of witch-hunts as a regulating tool for maintaining a hegemonic economic system where women’s bodies are sites for the deployment of ‘power techniques and power relations’, Suzette’s story reflects on the attachment that witches have to the earth. When the earth has been entirely decimated and depleted Suzette must pull from somewhere deeper inside herself, she is consumed by a character she has not yet succeeded in incarnating. This process of becoming in which Suzette harnesses her unrestrained naked instincts, draws on references such as Mary Wigman’s ‘Witch Dance’ of possession, where the dancing female body serves as a vehicle for alterity. Rather than considering bodies as closed physiological and biological systems, the film explores bodies as open, participating in the flow or passage of affect, characterized more by reciprocity and co-participation than boundary and constraint and explores the potential of the body for psychic or psychological attunement.
I used the film as a space to explore concepts of the structural body and prominence of witch hunts as foundational events in the construction of modern capitalist society to which Sylvia Federici’s work is key. This influenced the staging of the film which aims embody a nonlinear sense of time, where Suzette’s experiences are caught between her present experience of a post-capitalist future whilst held by the traumas of witches that came before her. By presenting Suzette’s destabilizing pull between multiple and parallel forms of persecution Suzette, like Mary wigman in Witch dance, experiences a freedom via her own expressive vocabulary.
In terms of the mood of the piece and setting, I had this idea to cross reference the past and future whilst still echoing a contemporary state. The land has turned to dust, nothing exists but the alive bodies that are within it. The wardrobe is characteristic of Victorian period clothing crossed with Celtic inspired jewelry. The composition is built on Welsh Vocalist Bethan Lloyd’s deep earthly and spiritual tones juxtaposed with industrial sounds that are built around her voice. The natural elements take presence in the cinematography with wind and smoke guiding our eye and the edit is long and visceral to move us through our bodies.
I like to hope that the film leaves us with a sense of hope that even in such political and environmental uncertainty, humans will always have the strength to grow and adapt to whatever space we are in. There is magic within and there is something inside of the human spirit that cannot be broken, even if the edges of our environment might have already crumbled.
