Leila Helena Grillo
Directing
Biography
Leila Helena Grillo (born January 23, 2000; Los Angeles) is an Italian-American multi-media artist whose films form eccentric worlds that are often at the edge of surrealism and hyper-realism, fusing playful dreamscapes and dark landscapes, peripheral spaces and fleeting moments. Alongside directing and writing, she is the musical composer of motion picture soundtracks under the pseudonym of Birdie Button, and is a set builder and puppet maker for stop-motion animations. She has worked predominantly on films and experimental shorts within the queer cinema movement and soft horror genres.
Known For
Presenting a woman, a female statue, a breathing tree, and a fish out of water, an unorthodox love story unfolds with the growth of limbs and expressive gestures. Accompanied by desire discovered and lost, erotic femininity disfigured in a domestic space, and physical forms fragmented, two women steep in their reticent intimacy.
Empty City
A collection of interwoven images are threaded together by a string of unspecified women who roam their dreamscape which they are unable to escape. They are displaced, belonging to no particular point in time or place, and a disoriented sense of self pervades. Together, the film becomes a quietly throbbing organism of reality and unreality, and the gaps between an impending present and a perpetual past are frail.
Woolgathering
A queer stop-motion animation live-action hybrid film following four women in a surrealist parallel narrative unconstricted to heteronormative space and time.
Blue Egg
A short by BUNNYTEEF about queer intimacy, communication and consent
La Petite Mort
a short film about gender euphoria