Gerda Johanna Cammaer Filmmaker

Originally from Leuven (Belgium) Gerda Johanna Cammaer combines a background in Communication Studies with Filmmaking and Film Studies. Both as a maker and as scholar she specializes in experimental and documentary film. For her Ph. D. (2010) she created an extensive research-creation project about the so-called “death of film” and the importance of experimental film practices in times of accelerated technological changes, which remains an important motif in her work today.

Her creative practice comprises poetic documentaries, video poems, essay films, eco-cinema, microcinema and mobile filmmaking, always in combination with experimental film practices. She worked with 16mm film, analogue and digital video, mobile filmmaking and multimedia. Her work has been exhibited at film festivals, in art galleries and at various conferences.

The four major themes in her work are nature and ecology, movement and time, culture and travel, and media history and technology. Several of her films combine two or more of these themes. Most of her artistic work originates from her fascination with time: her aim is to capture and recreate the fragility and durability of moments suspended in time or as Robert Bresson so nicely stated, to find for each shot a new pungency over and above what she had imagined: invention (re-invention) on the spot.