LA FLEUR DU MAL – DIRECTED BY MONICA ELKELV

Graduated (BA Honors) in Contemporary Media at Westminster University (London-UK), specialized in experimental filmmaking and art direction. Tutored by Bruce Elder, a leading figure of the Canadian avant-garde and Izabella Pruska-Odelholf, co-founder of Loop Collective, at Ryerson University, Toronto. Monica Elkelv is a filmmaker and art director based in London-UK. Elkelv’s interests range from the incorporation of the personal identity into the avant-garde forms in social, philosophical and metaphysical contexts. Elkelv is directing fashion films, video art and working as a freelance art director for feature films and commercials. Her latest art direction commission film ‘Beyond the Fire’ by Maeve Murphy has been awarded ‘Best UK Feature’ at London Independent Film Festival 2009 and ‘Best International Feature’ at Garden State Film Festival 2010 in New Jersey. Elkelv’s films has been screened at Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Whitechapel Gallery, Somerset House, In/Off Science Museum, Dialectos Digitales (Bolivia), Imprenta (L.A), New York Fashion Shorts, BIB NY, T.E.A Spain, Vauxhall Fashion Scout (London) Machine A, Vauxhall Fashion Scout and showcased in SHOWstudio, Dazed & Confused Digital and 4X Magazine.

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Gabriella Daris is an artist, dancer, researcher and academic writer. She was born in Canada and grew up in Greece, frequently traveling around the world researching dance anthropology and cultural aesthetics. She trained in classical ballet (RAD), (BA) in Art History and Literature (Goldsmiths College), (Post-Grad Cert.) in Dance History and Criticism (University of Chichester), (MRes) in Humanities and Cultural Studies (The London Consortium) and is currently working towards a PhD. She has performed and choreographed both for films and the stage, and taught contemporary dance worldwide including, UCLA and The Art Institute of Chicago. She performed and exhibited her work around the world, including, Benaki Museum – Athens, Gervasuti Foundation (for the opening of the 53rd Venice Biennale), Cabaret Voltaire Dada – Zurich (with her most known work, Woman-Bird), Asian Art Museum – SF, Highways Theatre – LA (with a performance best of 2007 by LA Times), Patravadi Theatre – Bangkok. Her academic contributions on the subject of body memory, dance, improvisation, photography and film, appeared in various conferences and academic journals and she is currently contributing with a critical essay on a Russian silent film for a forthcoming book publication by Palgrave Macmillan. Her research interests among many are eroticism, philosophy of death, dance history, archaeology & discourse of the body, with focus on the work of de Sade, Bataille, Blanchot and Heidegger. She has collaborated for a decade with filmmaker and collector of pre-cinema, Werner Nekes, on various experimental dance and erotic films, with former gallerist and artist, John Dunbar modeling for a series of photographs and drawings, and more recently, with conceptual artist, Michael Clark, on poetic plays, through the medium of sculptural performances.

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Nicholas Hopkins was born in Darlington, is a photographer and filmmaker. His most known films are, Le Grande Fumer (Super 8, 1995), Angels of Desire (16mm, 1997), Objects of the Dead (Video, 2000). He has been photographing since 1988, specializing in street and landscape, B & W, portraiture, and occasional, dance photography. He exhibited his work in Shell Central – London (2005), Decimas – Berlin (2009), Decimas – London (2010) and is currently working together with Gabriella Daris, on a film project “Masks of Desire” drawn out of his and hers massive masks’ collection.

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Derek R. Audette was born in Hull, Quebec, Canada. He has been a professional musician for more than a decade, being completely self-taught and proficient with 5 separate instruments, much of my time is spent playing and writing music. He has been called one of Canada’s most promising and potentially important young artists. His musical compositions have appeared in hundreds of films and television, radio and Internet broadcasts and he has performed in front of audiences across the continent. While Audette is primarily known for his unique and imaginative styles of poetry, music and abstract painting, he has also experimented extensively with video, digital art, photography and various forms of conceptual art. It has been said that as an artist “Audette possesses one of the broadest and most diverse ranges of talent among Canadian artists today.”

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Jaime Gil Larios is a multidisciplinary artist. After finishing his studies in Granada Art School, he started experimenting in a wide range of fields such as film, theatre, music, and different forms of graphic art. Originally from Spain, in 2005 he moved to London, where he has worked as a fashion photographer and as an art director for magazines such as B Magazine (Italy), Neo 2 (Spain) and Androgyny (UK). He has recently been focusing on the theatre stage and TV, for which he is currently carrying out two projects as an actor with Spanish television company El Terrat.

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John Dunbar is the son of the British filmmaker Robert Dunbar, one of the last links to the joint Anglo-German film productions of the early days of sound cinema. John attended Cambridge University where he met the singer Marianne Faithfull. The couple was married in 1965 with Peter Asher as the best man and spent their honeymoon in Paris with the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. In 1965, Dunbar co-founded the Indica Gallery with Barry Miles. The gallery became known for staging exhibitions by cutting edge artists, including Boyle Family, and Yoko Ono from the Fluxus movement. It was at Indica where he introduced Ono to John Lennon. Indica folded in just two years, after which Dunbar became an artist and exhibited work alongside Peter Blake and Colin Self. In January 2006 John Dunbar participated in the International Symposium on LSD in Basel, honouring LSD inventor Albert Hofmann on his 100th birthday. With John Hopkins and Barry Miles, Dunbar gave the seminar “LSD and its visual impact”.