Two screenings of Candy Darling at Ghent Film Festival

‘Candy Darling shows the transformation of a woman who evolves into a new state of a mind’, says Defrance. ‘There is no dialogue. Different sequences in the film describe the psychological stages she is experiencing. There is no classical narrative structure, but the film evolves towards a solution in the end.’ Candy Darling In this respect, Defrance stays close to the subject of the doctoral thesis she is working on, in which she explores the boundaries between narrativity and non-narrativity. ‘It is a topic that is very alive today, due to the explosive expansion of new media. The notion of ‘a story’ is being stretched nowadays and this tendency influences film in general and animation in particular. Today, animation appears in many forms other than stories, for instance in visual arts. Candy Darling is still some kind of story but is set in a surreal world, interpreting the rules of storytelling in a very free way.’Candy Darling Defrance started shooting Candy Darling in 2002. ‘I have had some nice experiences working on it but also some difficult cooperations. Thanks to the funding from the Flanders udiovisual Fund (VAF), I have been able to cooperate with other people, but it was hardly enough. The most difficult part was the sound. I decided not to use any live recorded sound because we shot the live action sequences in a building with very poor acoustics. So afterwards we had to apply sound effects, music and human sounds. Showing people without subtle breathing sounds feels very strange, as if there are not alive’. Candy Darling will be screened at Kinepolis Ghent on October 9 and 13 before the film Daisies by Vera Chytilova.Silvia DefranceLinks http://www.ada-online.be/videos/silvianl_web.mov www.filmfestival.be