THE FILMMAKER
Ginan Seidl participated in 2012 and 2016 in the Professional Media Master Class and Master Class Lab of Werkleitz in order to deepen her techniques in the production of documentary and experimental films. She won several art awards and previously took part in residencies in Istanbul and Mexico. Seidl is also a participant of the artists collective FILZ. She predominantly works on experimental and documentary filmmaking and video Installations. The topics she works on are often connected to her biography and out of the documentary field put into a fictionalized frame. Throughout her whole work she looks at the process of constructing identities, gender wise but also spiritually- and socially (and the interwovenness and ambivalences of these areas). Movement and stillness, visibility and invisibility, perceiving the body as a political space as well as a sculpture or tool of experiencing the world are fields she explores.

THE RESIDENCY
Seidl came to BAR with a skeleton of a script, a rough treatment and her aim was to use the two months in Beirut to research and write, get to know the place, where one of her protagonists should come from and perhaps find a cast that would fit her ideas. Seidl did an extensive research on the free dance and performance scene of Beirut and met people with whom she did a lot of interviews and used that information and insight glimpses to further develop her script and formal ideas. She was especially interested in queer performance artists and their perspective on the scene and their visibility or non visibility in the city, art world and the daily life.