From Dream World to Internet

When filmmaker LNZ Arturo came to the 57th Ann Arbor Film Festival this past March, she sat down for an interview with the festival, which would soon screen two of her recent works: a feature-length visual album made for the Internet, <3 (an emoticon heart); and the short film 2Missed Calls. “You could argue it’s an album release instead of a film screening,” she says.

LNZ describes <3 as 13 tracks forming a loosely woven narrative that traverses three psychological spaces: waking consciousness, subconsciousness, and a dream world. “They all sort of like spiral together until they collapse,” she says. “And then I’m uploaded to the Internet to ‘live forever.’”

LNZ has also described <3 as a “60-minute selfie.” In this conversation with AAFF, LNZ talks about how the advent of the selfie relates to the making of the visual album. “The selfie was always this weird, it felt like, mutation of where we were going with the digital image,” she says.

She also talks about process: “It’s a lot of thinking about the scene in a collage aspect where you sort of have a base frame and then you think about how you want to start adding in objects and textures.”

Enjoy more of the interview with LNZ Arturo.