Women’s collaborative short film

In celebration of International Women’s Day, a local Umina filmmaker is giving the community a sneak peek at her latest short film, Exquisite Corpse, which features some talented female creatives.

Amelia Foxton reached out to a group of women during the peak of COVID-19 lockdown, asking them to help her craft a film remotely using only their smartphones.

“In the hardest part of isolation, I had many incredibly talented friends stuck in their apartments not earning money and not knowing what to do,” Foxton said.

“They weren’t able to take any avenue for their creative expression, and I felt like something needed to be done; we needed to empower ourselves in some way.

“So, I thought of the Exquisite Corpse game and thought about how I could turn this concept into a film.”

Exquisite Corpse is a game commonly played by a group of artists, where participants take turns drawing sections of a body on a sheet of paper which is then folded to hide each contribution,

The first artist draws a head, and the next artist draws a torso without seeing what the previous drawing looks like —eventually, the unfolded paper shows a strange creature that all artists have created together.

“I thought I would get these seven incredible female friends who were all stuck in lockdown collaborate with me to create this strange creature of combined talents and see what came of it,” Foxton said.

“So, when they all agreed to it, I sent them out three lines in total which was just a very brief explanation of the character.”

The character is Lilac, a thirty-year-old novelist who is deep in the throes of writer’s block; she has put herself into isolation to help find some inspiration, which has an interesting effect on her mind.

The women were challenged to create their own story based on the short description of Lilac, unaware of what the other women had created.

“The only prompt they got was just the final five seconds of the previous artist’s contribution from which they continue on as Lilac, but with their own interpretation,” Foxton said.

“They would emulate and take on the story from there, entirely up to them to come up with their film genre, their style, and their script.

“They shot it all on their cell phones, so the quality of the video was dependent on their available lighting and their cell phones’ ability to record sound—so I knew the quality was going to vary pretty dramatically.”

Foxton said each woman had three days to shoot their two-minute scene after receiving the previous actress’s last five seconds.

“The piece came together beautifully, I was worried that I would get three dramas and two comedies sent back to me, but instead, there is a musical poetry piece, thrillers, and a silent film scene,” Foxton said.

“It was astonishing that these women came up with incredibly unique, engaging, and intriguing pieces that all still came together.

“There was no telling whether a storyline would form because I didn’t give them any indication of where the story was up to, so it was actually kind of miraculous how a storyline formed quite naturally even though there was no communication between the women.”

Exquisite Corpse is now making its way into film festivals worldwide and has already received an Honourable Mention in the Assurdo Film Festival, an international film festival for short films.

“It’s magnificent because, in a strange time of incredible challenge, women in isolation came together to express themselves and ended up making this incredible collaborative piece,” Foxton said.

“I’m so honoured to have been a part of that and had the chance to work with these wonderful women.”

Foxton offers an online link to watch the short film for a limited time:

Hayley McMahon