HORIZON OF EXILE
IMZ DANCE SCREEN AWARD 2007 - 'Best Screen Choreography', The Hague
CHOREOGRAPHY MEDIA HONORS AWARD 2008 - Dance Camera West, L.A
ULTIMATE PANEL'S CHOICE AWARD 2008, Jumping Frames, Hong Kong
JURY SPECIAL MENTION 2009, Il Coreografo Elettronico, PAN Museum, Naples
JURY SELECTION 2008, Videoformes, Clermont-Ferrand, France
“In the 21 minutes of Horizon of Exile it seems as though there is no choreography,
yet everything is in movement. That same oscillation found in the interior journeys
of films by Angelopolous, Egoyan and Tarkovski... Rocamora surprises us with
a work that is boundaryless, a work that arrives at ‘another place’, its own place,
the perfect site for the distinct world of feelings to be found in the film”
Ferrán Mateo, Porladanza Magazine, Spain
"The inner desert is no refuge and offers no shelter: it invites metamorphosis placing before us one way:
emptiness, renouncement, the void"
Marie Madelaine Davy
Horizon of exile is a film about female identity and displacement in the journey of exile. Set in the vast landscapes of the Atacama desert, and grounded by testimonies of Middle Eastern and Latin American women, Horizon employs the choreographed body, as a self-scripted body, to consider issues of self-image, belonging and effacement.
I like to combine the performative body with the worldly body,
fiction and metaphor with testimony
"In essence – territorial; in value: negative. This is exile, or – more precisely – the associations it evokes. Exile: life away from one's natural place, away from the space one is destined by birth to inhabit. And here Isabel Rocamora reminds us that a shoe, too, can be a kind of exile, or needless to say, the cloth covering a woman's head and face. Here is a woman preparing to be exiled from her own homeland, about to cross deserts and hostile borders. And she wears a white, narrow high-heeled shoe. Who could ever cover distances in such a high-heeled shoe? But this is just the shoe in which a woman is expected to properly fulfil her role as an object of beauty (as if the definitions of this role were part of the order of Creation, of nature itself)".
Amira Hass, journalist
(from "Exile and Horizons", Isabel Rocamora : Horizon of Exile)
An artist monograph titled Isabel Rocamora : Horizon of Exile is published by Sala Parpalló, Eds. Angela Molina F. and Isabel Rocamora, 2009.
Images: stills of Horizon of Exile extracted from 16 mm film.
Written, directed and choreographed by: Isabel Rocamora • Featuring: Camila Valenzuela, Paulina Garrido • Cinematography: Nic Knowland, BSC • Sound design: Paul Cowgill • Costumes: Lorena Zilleruelo • Sound recordist: Andrés Serrano • Gaffer: Paolo Chuyín • Commissioned by: dance-tech • Funded by: Arts Council England • Producer: Isabel Rocamora • Production Manager: Paulo Parra • Hosting Production Company Chile: Parox Films. Year of production: 2007.