Ann Arbor Film Festival
Updated: Feb 8, 2021
Soetkin Verstegen is a filmmaker based out of Brussels. Her films are composed of various techniques including drawing, sculpture, and experimentation. She studied scriptwriting and Cultural studies and is an alumna of the Animation Workshop's AniDox: Residency in Denmark and Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany. Verstegen also teaches animation workshops in addition to being a freelance animator, puppet, and set builder for studios.
Verstegen’s film, Freeze Frame, was presented at the 58th AAFF. We reached out to Verstegen to learn more about her process and method. Check out the interview below.
I studied film making and scriptwriting in Brussels. By coincidence, I started some short courses in animation and it's now what I do mostly. Animation is a way of combining many different art forms that I'm interested in.
Freeze Frame compares the fragile celluloid image to an ice cube. The figures in the film perform a hopeless but beautiful ritual of capturing and preserving. Through formal elements of early cinema, it plays with universal ideas of reanimation and death, motion and stillness, the original and its duplication, immortality, and decay. These reflections are set against the backdrop of a meditative, dreamy atmosphere.
I think the biggest challenge in making anything is structuring the ideas in my head, cutting things down, and making it simple. There's a moment of going down the rabbit hole when you start a film. Everything is interesting and anything is possible. Then there's a frightening moment of being stuck in that maze and not finding your way out. Getting out is a victory.
The context of residencies in which I made the film. I had the full time to dive into it and concentrate. I had no deadline, fixed topic, or outcome. This total freedom works very well for me. Then when I took a break, I was surrounded by artists and researchers with very different interests and disciplines. Once I stop working, I quite like to think and talk about something else. Most gratifying has been the way the film has been received beyond my expectations. That it seems to be understood in some way by so many different people.
I like to read and research about different topics and fields that loosely connect. Right now I'm growing more into observation, composition, choreography, than topic-based thinking. I just spend a lot of time looking at things, especially changes in light. I also try to attentively listen to everything that is around and how it mixes together. I'm impressed with films and other work which are felt rather than understood.
Not influential to particularly this film [Freeze Frame], but these are just some examples of great filmmakers, connected to animation: Karolina Glusiec, Miloš Tomić, Janie Geiser, Pia Borg, Patrick Bokanowski, Susann Maria Hempel, Moïa Jobin-Paré, Elise Simard, Boris Labbé, a lot of short animation coming from Poland. Documentary, dance, contemporary drawing, visual arts, and literature are also an inspiration.
It got some honors for being innovative and fresh. Which I'm happy to hear because I often feel a bit behind in time. I was most blown away by the jury report at Clermont Ferrand and the reaction from jury member Osbert Parker at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. I had no idea at the time the film would be picked up. One of the things said was that the film was needed in the world of today. I need film and to hear that your work is needed as well moved me a lot.
I've been mostly working with stop motion. Objects, puppets, materials. Right now, I'm working on a drawn animation. I've learned it in the past, but it's finding out how that works again, it's a different way of thinking.
I don't have a dogma of how films should be made. For some people, it is in the context of a bigger production with a lot of people and delegation. For me working as independently as possible and do most things myself seems to work best. Staying small can be a good strategy to keep on making films. This big recognition of exhibiting your work at the AAFF is then very important.
Actually, before the pandemic, I had some images in my head for a film about touch, contamination, and (over)protection. I was reading about how microbes and epidemics changed human history. Then the pandemic came and hacked my idea. It will be a topic in many films for years to come. My characters were wearing masks and protective suits, I mean, there's no way I'm going to do this now. As a smaller project, I'm working on a short drawn animation. It's a notebook of a web of thoughts during a residency on arts and science in Switzerland. While I was in quarantine I noticed I had an increased attention for nuance and subtlety.
I have been very lucky in these times. While others have been struggling, seeing their jobs disappear, I have been employed almost the entire period as an animator in a stop motion studio. It was the best way to spend this period where there's not much to do. I wasn't confined, I actually enjoyed traveling there every day on a nearly empty train or by bike. It's also a break from doing it all myself, and a way to build up some safety to keep on making independent films. But it is long days and weekends I have been mostly busy with the distribution of my film, which is pretty intense. So the biggest creative challenge has been I just didn't have time for personal work. In my head, it gave me space to think about something new, though.
Thank you for the interview and for continuing to give filmmakers a platform beyond the festival! I hope this special festival year gave the inspiration to make the next editions of the Ann Arbor Film Festival even richer.