Directing
Within the confines of a small south London flat, the filmmaker decides to finally say goodbye to her already lacking confidence and her friends come together to help her see this task through. Structured as a succession of informal conversations and exchanges between friends, Bye Bye Confidence opens up a space for un-mastering and un-learning expected behaviours.
‘Do I dance how you expect?’ The body of a poet is tracked in four connected domestic locations, corresponding to four poems: ‘Song of Jack’, ‘The Making of Him’, ‘My Orange Dance’ and ‘Opinion.’ This film is the result of a collaboration between two friends, poet-performer Ryan Ormonde and artist-filmmaker Madalina Zaharia, based on Madalina's observations of Ryan's poetic process. Through this exchange, the poet and the onlooker are collectively staging a particular sense of ‘publicness’, a certain type of relationship that relies heavily on the tension between the body and the voice, and has its source in practices of embodied poetry and writing. What is it to present yourself in a poem as well as on screen? The filmed body is captured at odds with the disembodied voice in voice-over. Moments of lip-synch simultaneously bridge and expose the schism. Queerness is delineated through its oppositions. Oranges will fall.
A modestly furnished apartment becomes overcrowded with its inhabitant's emotional life: feelings of inadequacy take over the kitchen, quieted anger spreads all across the walls and moments of performed healing find their way within the living room space.
Two figures in an idiosyncratic restorative session place grief onto a stone, alongside verbal self-soothing, guided gestures and blue thoughts.
