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Stay in a Friendly Country

Paul Tarragó

1995 00:14:18 United KingdomEnglishB&W and ColorStereo4:3Super 8 film

Description

Formally eclectic but heartfelt tribute to the holiday home movie heritage of low gauge formats.

Shot over 3 holidays, and including a dream I had about rescuing a cat from Norway, Stay … is my attempt to pay homage to 8mm’s home movie heritage. It’s pre-digital, so originally cut and shown as sticky tape spliced celluloid. Though rough hewn it’s a film that I still maintain a great fondness for.

p.s. The Wales section is shot on Single 8.

“This short proves that vacation movies can be made entertaining if one just takes the time to edit them. Indeed I found this Super-8 short about the director’s trip across Europe to be rather inspiring, demonstrating how anyone with a little imagination and a papier mache cat can be a filmmaker instead of just a camera operator.”
–hybridmagazine.com

About Paul Tarragó

Paul Tarragó is a filmmaker, using both video and celluloid, living in London. His work? A mix of underground experimentation and metafiction, tugging at the leash of film language but with narrative often held close at hand.

His work has shown widely on film festival and gallery circuits (International Film Festival Rotterdam, NYUFF, EMAF, National Review of Live Art, Triangle France, Kino der Kunst), and includes several award winning experimental narratives, video installation, a collaborative feature film, cinematic sketchbooks, moving image + live soundtrack performance work, etc.

A formative influence on his DIY approach comes from his experiences (from 1993-2006) as a core member and activist with the Exploding Cinema: a collective dedicated to originating alternative methods of exhibition for low-budget/artists' film and video and related performance.