Mill Valley Film Festival Presents: Serendipity

Mon Oct 7, 7pm Sequoia Mill Valley
Expected Guest: Director Prune Nourry In Person

This is multidisciplinary artist Prune Nourry’s stunning, vulnerable and intimate feature filmmaking debut. In the film, the French-born, New York-based artist merges two of her identities – those of artist and patient – and delivers a visually and emotionally arresting documentary that is both a self-portrait (first-person footage) and a reassessment of her body of work (conceptual interpretation). This is “a way to come back to being a sculptor, and not being a sculpture,” she says. 



Women’s bodies and fertility are the themes that knit together the artist's work in a career that has traversed the globe with sculptural installations, solo shows, and performances. Those themes remain, but Nourry turns her gaze inward (with occasional aid and support from the great Agnès Varda) following her breast cancer diagnosis. 

An unfailing collector of images and ephemeral moments, now the artist is both moment and image, a circumstance wherein the patient is artist, artist is patient, and art becomes medicine. "When you are ill, you realize that health is everything," says Nourry, "And the essentials to life really are health, love, and art."

Serendipity is both a “medical odyssey” and an “epic artistic adventure as she discovers new meaning in her impressive body of work and its serendipitous relationship to her own survival.” Perhaps this film will offer not only a glimpse into the experience of coping with such an illness, but insight into the strength it takes to share that journey.

Long-term projects such as the ‘Army of Terracotta Daughters’ have brought Nourry to international attention and the Guimet Museum in Paris recently honored her with a retrospective of her work. Executive produced by Angelina Jolie, Darren Aronofsky and Sol Guy, Serendipity premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, and screened at MoMA Doc Fortnight and the Tribeca Film Festival.

Tickets:
Online or in person at the box office inside Poet and/the Bench daily 11-3 through Oct 3

About the Artist and Film:
Prune Nourry website
IndieWire Article
Women and Hollywood Article

Poet and/the Bench is proud to be a Community Partner Sponsor of this film. As many in the community know, our co-founder Bonnie Powers has a history of family cancers, including breast cancer. Bonnie herself carries the BRCA2 mutation and had prophylactic surgeries to dramatically reduce her risk for breast and ovarian cancers. Please consider adding Serendipity to your Film Festival experience.

In addition to the showing on Oct 7 at which we will be present, you can watch it on Fri Oct 11 at 3:15pm at Century Larkspur; Box Office info here or online tickets here.