Savage Witches

feature film, 2012, 70 mins

The first collaboration between Daniel & Clara, Savage Witches is an experimental feature film about creative freedom and the possibilities of cinema as an art form.

Framed around a story of two girls who seek to transform the world around them through magic, Savage Witches is a playful unraveling of narrative and formal conventions, subverting expectations of what a film can be.




“In 2010 cinema was dominated by realism on one side and super hero films on the other. Artist film was usually black and white essay films with monotone voice overs – it was all very masculine, very rational, conservative and a bit depressing – we wanted to tear it all apart and build a cinema in our own way: a cinema that was playful, truly experimental, feminine, colourful, queer, theatrical, sensorial, illogical – wild and free.”

- Daniel & Clara





Shot on a variety of camera formats from VHS to HD, and not conforming to a single stylistic approach, in Savage Witches the screen becomes a canvas of visual experimentation, mixing a great variety of textures, colours and techniques that tear through narrative and formal conventions in order to liberate our senses and activate the imagination.

As the film unfolds, the process of filmmaking seeps into the film itself, extending the search for creative freedom to all levels of the film and blurring any distinctions between documentary, fiction, reality and artifice. The actresses who play the lead roles start to question the motivations and process of the artist, tensions about control and freedom emerge.






“We met in Brighton at the end of November 2010, we got talking about art and cinema and realised we had a shared vision for the possibilities of cinema as an art form - within a few weeks we had begun making our first film together. We both handed in notice on our flats so we could pool all our money into the work, we rented a basement under a shop in Brighton to use as a studio and secretly lived there while we made the film. It took 18 months to make and by the time it was finished our lives had change, we were no longer two individuals collaborating, we'd become two halves of one artist.”

- Daniel & Clara





Savage Witches premiered at the Cambridge Film Festival in 2012 as a part of the Microcinema strand curated by James Mackay.



Savage Witches was the big bang of our collaboration, particles of everything we have made since can be found in that film”

- Daniel & Clara




Screenings

2018   Exploding Appendix, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
2017   Moon Moths, MacArts Centre, Galashiels, UK
2016   Experimental Film Society, Filmbase, Dublin, Ireland
2016   Palácio das Artes, Porto, Portugal
2015   Cultivate Film Club, Manchester, UK
2014   Circuito Nomadica, Benevento, Italy
2014   Scalarama 2014, SeventySeven, Bristol, UK
2014   Wrong Directions Cinetent at Nozstock Festival, Herefordshire, UK
2014   Portugal Underground Film Festival, Lisbon, Portugal
2014   Vagrant Film Festival, Belarus
2014   Circuito Nomadica, Bologna, Italy
2014   Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, Hawick, Scotland, UK
2014   Silvestre Concertos & Film Screening, Porto, Portugal
2013   Film Mutations, Festival of Invisible Cinema, Zagreb, Croatia
2013   PollyGrind Underground Film Festival, Las Vegas, USA
2013   South Texas Underground Film Festival, Corpus Christi, USA
2013   Portobello Film Festival, London, UK
2013   Spectacle Theater, New York, USA
2013   International Festival of Cinema Libre, Hamburg, Germany
2013   Cinema Culture, Chicago, USA
2012   The Horse Hospital, London, UK
2012   Brighton Cine-city Film Festival, UK
2012   Microcinema Artist’s Moving Image, Cambridge Film Festival, UK






"Daniel & Clara, like Kenneth Anger, see filmmaking as a Magickal act, a spell to unleash freedom of thought, of vision, of the imagination."
- David Finkelstein, Film International


"It’s one of the most remarkable and celebratory films I have seen in a long time, a genre-defying explosion of creativity, personal expression and experimentation. It breaks all the boundaries between DIY and ‘art’ filmmaking, between narrative and experimental, between actor and film-maker."
- Richard Ashrowan, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival


"Their shamanic approach to Cinema, combined with a very deep engagement with movie history, makes viewing their films what could be described as an ‘alchemical experience’."
- Rouzbeh Rashidi, Experimental Film Society