Director: Kirsten Hudson

Synopsis: Grief changes you, completely, utterly, profoundly. Traditionally regarded as a sacred communal process, grief is the great transformer; a process that according to Francis Weller (2015), offers a wild kind of alchemy that “transmutes suffering into fertile ground”. Starting from the premise that “Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground” (Oscar Wilde, 1857), This Fragile Present Moment (A Dirge for Sweet Things Lost) is a handmade cameraless 16mm film that interprets Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler’s “Six Stages of Grief” (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Reconstruction, Meaning) into a cinematic map for a transformative hero’s journey.

Bio: Kirsten Hudson creates film, performance, & objects that visually register, perform, or speculate upon, human, non-human, & other-than-human experiences & embodiment. She publishes on subjects such as: the experience of maternal loss; ethics/aesthetics of performance; collaborative transdisciplinary pedagogy; bio-art & the materiality of “life”; & also dystopian literature. Hudson has a PhD in Fine Arts & Cultural Studies & is currently a Screen Arts & Photography lecturer at Curtin University in Western Australia.

Program: Color, Movement & Fashion  – VAEFF 2023