Sue De Beer On Shooting Noir In the Middle East, The Excitement of Unpredictability, and Explaining American Puritanism to German Electro-Clash Musicians

Sue de Beer

Untitled (Mariya), 2009/2011

Sue de Beer paints a lonely, haunting portrait with moving imagery. She is a filmmaker, but she is ultimately an artist in the sense that her short films exist in a sculptural environment that typically inhabits a physical space – usually a gallery – replete with film stills, three dimensional objects and more. Her films are often inspired or influenced by literary works and deal with identity, memory, and paranormal activity. In her film Ghosts, an occult hypnotist recovers lost lengths of time from peoples’ memories and returns them as if they are new memories. In another film, The Quickening, sexuality and desire is explored in an oppressive environment of Puritanical New England in the 18th century. The installations in which De Beer presents her films creates an almost dreamlike environment that leaves the viewer wondering if the time spent within the installation was a dream itself. Click here to read our interview of the artist.