Directed by Lisa and written by Ava, Motion draws on Maya Deren’s legacy to explore what it means to feel stuck, to search for meaning, and to inhabit a body shaped by expectation. The film resists traditional storytelling, instead moving through sensations, fragments, and emotions — tracing the quiet dissonance of womanhood through image, rhythm, and sound.
Shot on 16mm film, Motion embraces an analog sensibility that mirrors its thematic core. Each frame feels intentional: heavy with grain, shadow, and silence. The decision to shoot on film wasn’t merely aesthetic but ideological: a reclaiming of slowness, tactility, and imperfection in an age of digital immediacy. Every shot carries weight because every shot had to be chosen. In this way, Motion becomes a curated experience, intimate, deliberate, and profoundly human.
An Experiment in Feminist Collaboration
The film was born out of Ava’s personal monologue, a text that grew into something collective through collaboration with Lisa. Both filmmakers share a background in experimental women’s cinema, and this shared language guided their process. They worked with a small team, embracing a low-budget and collaborative ethos reminiscent of Maya Deren’s own practice; where limitation becomes liberation, and artistic constraint opens new creative spaces.
The editing process, too, followed this philosophy. The editor was given creative freedom to reshape the material into a dreamlike, fragmented structure. Rather than serving the logic of narrative, the edit follows the logic of emotion and intuition. Scenes dissolve into one another like memories, resisting linearity and embracing ambiguity. The result is a film that feels both deeply personal and open-ended, an emotional landscape that invites the viewer to inhabit it.
Dream, Disconnection, and the Search for Meaning
Motion explores the collective female experience: the sensation of being trapped, disconnected, and suspended in the search for meaning. It is a meditation on the quiet spaces between movement and stillness, the moments when time seems to fold in on itself.
The characters exist in a liminal world, one where the boundaries between inner and outer blur. The imagery is dreamlike, punctuated by recurring symbols: water, broken mirrors, and flower crowns. These motifs evoke the fluidity and fragility of identity — the constant negotiation between the self we feel and the self the world reflects back to us.
Water flows through the film as both a literal and emotional current. It mirrors the subconscious: calm one moment, destructive the next. It becomes a metaphor for womanhood itself, an element of creation and erasure, resistance and release.
Sound as Subconscious Texture
The sound design in Motion is not background, it is the film’s heartbeat. Original compositions and ambient sounds create a sensory landscape that dips into the subconscious. Water drips, echoes distort, silence stretches. These sounds don’t just accompany the images; they speak to what the images cannot say.
By juxtaposing analog visuals with a digitally constructed soundscape, the filmmakers create a dialogue between eras and mediums, a merging of past and present, physical and ephemeral. The analog becomes the body; the digital, the mind. Together they form the film’s emotional architecture.
Visual Symbolism and the Fragmented Self
Throughout Motion, visual motifs deepen the film’s emotional texture. Mirrors and reflections, directly inspired by Deren’s work, symbolize fractured identity and the impossibility of seeing oneself fully. The act of reflection becomes an act of fragmentation: each image, a partial truth.
The flower crown, worn by one character, stands in stark contrast to the rest of the visual palette. It suggests a kind of rebellion, a celebration of chaos, beauty, and refusal. Against the muted tones and structured frames, the crown feels alive, almost defiant. It speaks to the coexistence of restraint and freedom within the feminine experience. The tension between what is expected and what is desired.
Costume and visual design are not decorative here; they are deeply psychological. Every texture, every contrast articulates the film’s central concern: the multiplicity of womanhood.
From Water to Fire: The Promise of Continuation
Motion represents the first part of a planned trilogy. While this chapter focuses on water, future installments will explore fire and sand — three elements that together trace an emotional and symbolic journey through transformation. Water flows, fire consumes, sand endures.
The trilogy hints at an evolving inquiry into the feminine condition, one that acknowledges both destruction and renewal as necessary parts of becoming.
Feminism in Form and Feeling
To call Motion a feminist film is not simply to point to its themes, but to its method. Its feminism lies in the way it was made: collaboratively, intuitively, and without hierarchy. The creative process itself becomes a statement of resistance against rigid structures that too often dominate filmmaking.
The film’s refusal to explain itself, its comfort in ambiguity, its embrace of emotion, is profoundly political. It insists that women’s stories do not need to be neat, logical, or conclusive to hold meaning. They can be fluid, fragmented, and deeply felt.
In Motion, form and feeling merge into one. It is not a film to be understood, but to be experienced, to be felt, remembered, and carried.
A Feminist Cinema of Becoming
Motion reminds us that experimental cinema remains a space for freedom. It is a place where women can redefine both representation and process. In its imagery, we find vulnerability and resistance; in its rhythm, the movement of thought itself.
The film does not claim to speak for all women, but rather opens a space for each viewer to locate their own reflection within it. It is as much about the act of seeing as it is about what is seen.
Through Motion, Lisa and Ava extend Maya Deren’s legacy — not by imitation, but by transformation. Their film is an offering: an exploration of what it means to move through womanhood, to resist stillness, and to remain, always, in motion.
A while ago, I had the pleasure of meeting the creators of The Motion and sitting down with them for an interview on behalf of the FCA, back when the film had its premiere. It’s been wonderful to see how far it has come — the film has now been nominated for the Phoenix Rising Film Festival in London and the 21° Festival Transterritorial de Cine Underground in Argentina!
The team is now on the hunt for a new producer to complete the trilogy, so if you’re interested in joining their journey, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can send an email with a CV and portfolio to motiondamesproductions@gmail.com
Written by Martina Del Chiaro
