The Girl behind the White Picket Fence
Feature (61 min.)
a project by Stefanie Schneider
cast: Udo Kier, Heather Megan Christie, Steve Marshall, Kyle Larson, Jeff Leaf Camille Waldorf, music: Adam Weiss, Daisy McCrackin, Zoe Bicat, Axel Ruhland, Sophie Huber, Max Sharam, script: Stefanie Schneider, Tanja Trittmann, Robert Mack, Cheyenne Randall, Billy Harvey, directed, photographed and edited by Stefanie Schneider, producer micafilm, Berlin, producer California Instantdreams, Lance Waterman, co-produced by Arte, supported by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg. >> order DVD for €30
This art film’s cryptic analysis of love is back-dropped by a feeling that our future is hopeless but that it relentlessly continues. ‘The Girl behind the White Picket Fence’ starts by introducing the orphaned girl ‘Heather’ (Heather Megan Christie) who lives in the Southern California Desert in her parent’s 50 foot travel trailer. Heather’s background reveals how through her ambition to grow, she steps out to find love but quickly realizes that there’s much more to life than she had thought. Retreating to her trailer, she finds a radio station that speaks her language. ‘The Lonely Hearts Radio Station’. The DJ (Steve Marshall) himself a refugee from a mysterious past of ended affairs, deals with his own demons. The local garbage man ‘Hank’ (Kyle Larson) who has issues too, due to the recent death of his wife, hears Heather call into the radio station and becomes obsessed with her and starts collecting her discarded memories on his garbage route. Damon the DJ quickly falls in love with Heather even though he’s never met her and sabotages Hanks interest by competing for her heart. Through the radio, love is reborn and the cycle continues.
A mystic shaman (Udo Kier) suddenly appears trying to help Heather and Hank to get together but fails until through a bizarre dream, shows her, how to become aware and find her future love. The ending is happy until you realize that the future they’re betting on, is hollow.
>> www.heatherdreams.com
Heather's Dream
Short (15 min.)
a project by Stefanie Schneider
cast: Udo Kier, Heather Megan Christie, Camille Waldorf, music: Adam Weiss, script: Tanja Trittmann, directed, photographed and edited by Stefanie Schneider, producer micafilm, Berlin, co-produced by Arte, supported by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg >> order DVD for €20
"Heather's Dream" has been accepted in the competition at the Short Film Festival in Oberhausen in May 2013!
July 2013 - nominated for the German Short Film Award (Deutscher Kurzfilmpreis) 2013
Heather (Heather Megan Christie) lies on her bed and narrates off screen: "One morning I didn´t wake up. I had a fever". And then finds herself in a dazzling desert landscape. Here a magic doctor (Udo Kier) pursues his work in his office. Something is going on. Everything seems to be prepared. The atmosphere in his office, open to all directions is hypnotic. The patient is waiting for her mysterious treatment. Dried up plants are sitting on the table. A flip book, a suitcase, a broken heart.... Enchanted examinations begin. The bizarre, charismatic doctor continues his evaluation assisted by a fairy-like nurse (Camille Waldorf). The process follows a secret logic and Heather understands that there is hope to be healed. Heather's Dream has not been filmed in a classical way but Udo Kier's and Heather Megan Christie's acting has been photographed action by action, step by step with thousands of Polaroids and edited into sequence, combined with Super-8 footage. The bright light of California, the forsaken abandoned landscapes around 29 Palms and the faded colors of the Polaroid film contribute to the poetic and surreal atmosphere of he film.
>> www.heatherdreams.com
29 Palms, CA
a project by Stefanie Schneider
in collobaration with Radha Mitchell, Renée Chabria, Marc Forster, Nadia Conners, Robert Mack, Camille Waldorf, JD Rudometkin and Udo Kier
producers: Mica film, Berlin, Caroline Haertel, Udo Kier, Robert Mack, Lance Waterman
a project by stefanie schneider
story and script written by jd rudometkin
acting by jd rudometkin and stefanie schneider
assistance kirsten schneider
Adam Budak, Kunsthaus Graz, Oct 2005
"MICA films", a Berlin based production company run by Caro- line Haertel and Mirjana Momirovic is currently producing the episode.
A film shot on Polaroid stills combined with Super 8 film sequences has never been done before. This unique project will be co-produced by ARTE and has received film funding from "Medienboard Berlin Brandenburg".
"Till death do us part" tells the love story of two beautiful women in the Californian desert. Cristal (Daisy McCracking) and Margarita (Austin Tate) meet in the abandoned town of 29 Palms,CA. They are both longing for something better after leaving a life neither could bare. They are full of hope and an intense lust for life. They want to live in the now, fast and wild. Their love starts on fast forward from the moment they meet.
The Californian desert light and the vintage colours of Polaroid create a unforgetable atmosphere in the abandoned trailer park.
Austen Tate gives Margarita her voice in poetry and Daisy McCracking give Cristal her sound in music. Additional music by Zoe Bicat and Sophie Huber.
Mica Film and Stefanie Schneider have founded the Record Label "29 Palms, CA Records" and Released the Soundtrack "Till Death Do Us Part" of Daisy McCRackin's music.
a project by stefanie schneider
images, mise en scène and editing by stefanie schneider
with renée chabria, scott springer, derrik first
assistance kirsten schneider
....In Renée’s Dream, issues of role reversal take place as the cowgirl on her horse undermines the male stereotype of Richard Prince’s ‘Marlboro Country’. This photo-work along with several others by Schneider, continue to undermine the focus of the male gaze, for her women are in- creasingly autonomous and subver- sive. They challenge the male role of sexual predator, often taking the lead and undermining masculine role play, trading on male fears that their desires can be so easily attained. That she does this by working through archetypal male conventions of American culture, is not the least of the accomplishments in her work. What we are confronted with frequently is of an idyll turned sour, the filmic clichés that Hollywood and American television dramas have promoted for fifty years. The citing of this in the Romantic West, where so many of the male clichés were generated, only adds to the diminishing sense of substance once attributed to these iconic American fabrications. And, that she is able to do this through photographic images rather than film, undercuts the dominance espoused by time-based film. Film feigns to be seamless though we know it is not. Film operates with a story board and setting in which scenes are elaborately arranged and pre-planned. Schneider has thus been able to generate a genre of fragmentary events, the assemblage of a story without a storyboard. But these post-narratological stories require another component, and that component is the viewer who must bring his own interpretation as to what is taking place. If this can be considered the upside of her work, the downside is that she never positions herself by giving a personal opinion as to the events that are taking place in her photographs. But, perhaps, this is nothing more than her use of the operation of chance dictates....
Marc Gisbourne, “Stranger Than Paradise”
>> more info
A dark room. An installation of 32 Lightboxes (20x20cm to 40x50cm) connected to speakers on 4 walls. As the images light up, the inhabitants of "29 Palms, CA" tell their stories and relate to each other. The audience stands in the middle of the room and at times more than one image lights up and the Voices, Sounds and / or music surround the viewer. The installation runs on an endless loop.
Stefanie Schneider meets Cyndi Lauper
{ ARTE 10.05.2008 20:15 - 21:00 }
Stefanie Schneider photographs the Cyndi Lauper cover 2008.
__the substory of 29 Palms, CA [ an art project by Stefanie Schneider ]
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