25 New Faces - Eva Ilona Brzeski

Eva Ilona Brzeski's trajectory as a filmmaker traces not just a growing body of sumptuous, intriguing work but also an evolving sense of trust. Each of her films, beginning with the quietly beautiful investigation of her father's past in This Unfamiliar Place to her recently shot feature, Last Seen, ventures into uncharted waters in terms of creative process, subject matter, and scope. "I like getting to something essential," she says, "but through a side door so that somehow you get to those things you can't access directly."

Brzeski's filmmaking career began in the mid-80s when she decided to combine her interests in oral history, photography, and deejaying with filmmaking. Her first film, Blue Plate Special, is a portrait of a local diner. "I've always been interested in the connection between place and memory," says Brzeski, "and the luncheonette seemed to embody that relationship." Brzeski next enrolled in the Documentary Film Program at Stanford. "There I encountered the rules of documentary filmmaking," she says, "and I immediately started running in the opposite direction. I found myself much more drawn to a personal, impressionistic filmmaking, something more happenstance and unpredictable."

The happenstance and unpredictable are now the defining characteristics of Brzeski's filmmaking process. She begins with an idea, something not quite identifiable, and follows it. "It's exciting not knowing where you're going," she says, and indeed, the evanescent, almost ineffable quality of the feelings and questions Brzeski pursues is remarkable, as is the movement between documentary and the very personal. This Unfamiliar Place deftly captures a daughter's ambivalent feelings regarding her lack of access to the recesses of her father's memories, while 24 Girls, another short, beautifully evokes the sense of loss that hovers around the liminal moment of transition for girls just prior to adolescence. And Brzeski's films embody this slippery quality aesthetically -- she does a lot of optical printing, and often mixes film stocks and video formats. "I am interested in breaking an image down to its painterly essence and in creating a palette of textures," she says.

Brzeski shot her first feature on DV last year in collaboration with Holiday Reinhorn. "There are 65 characters, 120 scenes, and 200 locations," says Brzeski. "We had no budget so it was all about what we could do with the resources at hand, which is extremely liberating." Brzeski took the project to IFFCON in January, and will screen a cut at the IFFM this fall. If it's anything like her shorts, Last Seen will be aesthetically dazzling while tracing the contours of places rarely seen or experienced directly.