Film Director, Video Artist & Multimodal Practitioner
Anna Kushnerova’s practice moves across film, movement, and material installation, working with multimodality as a way to access the subconscious and dreamlike strata of experience. She wonders how the performativity of filming and documentation technologies might be reconfigured, shifting from passive recording devices into active participants in emergent realities. She explores how collective dreaming and embodied movement practices can unfold as forms of ecological inquiry and contemporary myth-making. And she seeks to discover how a living archive of etudes: fragments of film, gesture, and encounter, can open pathways for socially engaged, site-responsive cinema.
Fairy tales serve as a vital narrative undercurrent in her work as a genre that resists the linearity and irreversibility of historical time. Myths and tales offer a language where space and time collapse, where the fantastic and the real intertwine. In this space, distortion is a portal into polysemic meaning. Her films operate as hybrid forms, digital collages of Butoh dance, sculptural gesture, elemental materials, and sound improvisation. Through these liminal and layered vocabularies, she crafts cinematic rituals that flicker between the archaic and the speculative, where imigary has an aura.
With a background in dance, ceramics, and textiles, she approaches cinema through spatial and corporeal processes that extend into costume, mask, and scenographic installation. Working with wax, resin, metal mesh, cloth, and found organic matter, she creates hybrid architectures and wearable sculptures: exoskeletons, animal extensions, breathing membranes, forgotten shells that activate the body as a site of transformation and metamorphosis.
Her films unfold as sensorial myths, porous to ecological rhythms and ancestral memory. Rooted in eco-somatic and deep ecological inquiry, she works in situ with forests, rivers, soils, and islands of biodiversity, treating them as multi-dimensional beings. Space is navigated through dreams, songs, plant allies, and rituals of orientation where rivers become roads, mountains become guardians, and plants are teachers.
Kushnerova’s methodology, informed by Butoh, performance, ethnography, and sculptural scenography, is attentive to the liveliness of material entanglements. Each film is conceived as a living organism: a temporary third space where human and more-than-human agencies meet, metamorphose, and co-create new myths of belonging.
Her works, from feature-length “documentary–fairytales” to site-responsive installations and living archives of etudes propose cinema as a multimodal ecology of movement, material, and imagination. They invite audiences into a poetic territory where fragmented memory, hybrid bodies, and the thousand creatures beneath the skin resurface, in memory of being that is rooted in rhythm, reciprocity, and the ongoing metamorphosis of the world.