ochobarcos / eightboats filmproduction

Synopsis

A shiny blue bird in a thorny thicket of dark silver, stone drops falling from a metal cloud, a ghost train loaded with mysterious treasure – Australian artist Helen Britton’s jewelry seems to emerge from some forgotten Wunderkammer. And yet her pieces are modern, avant-garde jewelry, admired and collected around the world.Accompanying the artist on her search for precious and everyday materials and her exploration of nearly forgotten craft techniques, Hunter From Elsewhere – A Journey With Helen Britton shows her encounters with the last remaining keepers of a vanishing knowledge, following her from Idar-Oberstein (Rhineland-Palatinate), via Lauscha (Thuringia), to Newcastle (New South Wales) and Bangkok. Finally, Helen Britton grants the audience a private look inside her Munich workshop: to watch her transforming her trouvailles and travel impressions into unique wearable sculptures, preparing coming exhibitions, and discussing her work with curators. In the course of this journey, the film examines not only the creation process, but also the fascination and attraction that jewelry has always held for us human beings.

Director's Note

I met Helen Britton about twenty years ago, at Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts, where she was a guest student in Otto Künzli’s goldsmith class. I was sitting on the jury for the competition “Film and Jewelry”. We screened a film, and the students had 48 hours to interpret it as jewelry. I clearly recall Helen’s object: She had sawed a hollow brooch from the handle of a toothbrush – rendering the essence of the film’s love story. The colored fragment shifting back and forth within the handle elicited in me a sensation of pain. How can an object like that rouse such feelings?

Over the years, I have followed Helen’s development in Munich, the worldwide center of contemporary avant-garde jewelry. In my encounters with many other jewelry artists, I have reflected on what makes jewelry so existential – beyond its material value. What imbues a ring with significance? What lends one’s grandfather’s chain, one’s mother’s earrings their meaning? What motivates international jewelry collectors on their hunt around the globe?

Jewelry comes alive only when it is worn – when it becomes a talisman, a messenger from another world. Jewelry speaks a universal language – in every culture, in every family, for each human being. It involves rituals, the body, space. Jewelry speaks of love, respect, and above all: loss.

The Film

I spent four years accompanying Helen Britton: in her workshop, across Australia, to Idar Oberstein, and to Lauscha in the Thuringian Forest. The images captured through my camera speak of searching and seeing – movements in nature, industrial ruins, collapsing culture, vanishing craftsmanship.

My attitude is a poetic one. I wanted to make a film that transports the audience into a dream, while granting the space for this to happen. It was then in the editing, with Nina Ergang, that the film found its rhythm and its form: as text and montage called for each other, back and forth. My long search for the music to support the sequences led me to such musicians as The Notwist, Driftmachine, Sasebo, Radio Citizen, and Mount Hush.

It was a long process. The final result is the film I sought to make.

Photography: Lilli-Rose Pongratz, Stefan Brainbauer, Robin Worms, Elena Alvarez Lutz

Editing: Nina Ergang (bfs)

Soundtrack: The Notwist, Driftmachine, Radio Citizen, Sound Voyage, Sasebo, Mount Hush, Exlex

Financial Support: Brougier-Seisser-Cleve-Werhahn Stiftung

97 min., color, 2K / HD, 16:9, 5.1 Dolby, English & German, Engl. subtitles