We did the filming at Tokai forest over a few days. I would always come back totally exhausted. This project seems to go deeper than what it looked like on the surface. I think a lot about the young man Harald was … it's always about him. My whole life revolved around him … all the highs and lows … and now that we are not together anymore, it is still Harald I talk about - and our story. It is always Harald.
“Working and filming with the tent, the coat, the dress, the houses and the shoes … and the book … is like telling this story again in a new form. It's like reshuffling my interior headspace - moving the furniture around in the attic … lots of old dust gets dispersed up there … the light catches the tiny particles glittering like snowflakes in the dark … it will take a while until it all settles again and it becomes just the place of my memories once more…visited occasionally, in moments of nostalgia or some inner turmoil.”
Artworks by Gina Niederhumer
Artist and Art Facilitator
+27 (0)84 558 5268
Textile Studio & Shop
38 Palmer Road7
945 Muizenberg,
Cape Town
I walked into Gina’s magical shop four years ago, one person, and two hours later I left knowing I had found a new friend. Gina’s story fascinated me … a woman … a man’s trench coat stitched with loving hands, took me on this journey of illumination.
How to tell her story eluded me, until one day I saw a faded photograph of a dress that was stitched with her love. "Do you still have the dress?" I asked … a germ of an idea. As Karel Nel says, it starts with one mark. My mark was a forest inhabited with fireflies, dryads and fairies.
Gina was at my side. Together, we felt companionship and excitement as our similar but different stories began to emerge. A fairy crown, a page-by-page stitched overlay onto Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa of her early married life story, a sheltering tent, keys that tinkle and hang from a dress, shoes with no soles all tied together with red wool threads and joining the pieces of her halting story.
“Later, when Gina through her art tells her story, we both now see what the other saw.”
Director/Cinematographer/Editor Michael Donnelly (@michael_donnelly_productions_)
Script by Gina Niederhumer and Michael Donnelly (@michael_donnelly_productions_)
Actors: Zoe Nepgen (@zoesoulplay) and Jack Donnelly (@jackdonnellyy_)