Filmmaker
Laida Lertxundi (Bilbao, Spain, 1981) received a Master’s from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and a degree in Fine Arts from Bard College. Her films, most of which are shot in 16 mm, are set in natural, urban and domestic spaces in Los Angeles and the surrounding area, where she has lived for over a decade. Encapsulated within the generic title of ‘Landscape Plus’, her films move between private, interior spaces and the enormity of California’s huge open spaces, with the intention of spanning a geography that is transformed by affective and subjective states.
In her cinema, cinematographic forms of narration are diluted and replaced by a revealing of the process and its materiality. The intense work of linking images and diegetic sounds produces a synchrony that creates the sensation of real time and lived experience – a tension between the form and the experience that always transcends it. In this way, the most formalist or abstract side of her cinema, structural in its vocation, is traversed by an emotional tone, at the same time as it throws out red herrings about ambiguous fictions.
She is currently a lecturer in Fine Arts and Humanities in the Art Center College of Design de Pasadena, after having taught earlier at the University of California in San Diego and at CalArts.
www.laidalertxundi.com