My journey to hell and back

• Tech Stack: Adobe Premiere Pro, lighting
• View the project here : Project Link

For my video performance assignment, I decided to bring a topic of the silence of women in my country up, particularly, I would like to convey how because of remaining silent hundreds of thousands of women suffer every day from domestic violence. So, to interpret this idea in a very creative way my choice fell on making a short film performance. This is not just a film or video. It was a very special work of art to me.

According to the WHO published estimates, approximately one in three women (30%) in the world during their lifetime is exposed to domestic violence. Every day different stories, different women. Analyzing this part, I created an imaginary story called “My journey to hell and back” on behalf of a woman who encountered domestic abuse.

Thinking about the experimental aspect, after a long brainstorming I decided to convey this imaginary case in a more interesting and not boring way. Through story-telling. I did not want to just put my story as an overlay text to the video that is why I divided many A4 papers into four parts and wrote the story. To be honest, I could take one real-life story related to domestic abuse that happened recently in my country and use it as a reference. However, I felt like I needed to create my own one taking into account the general atmosphere of the situations happening in my country.

In terms of aesthetics and technicality, in order to make this performance more powerful and make people get goosebumps first of all, I started the video with real, loud, authentic shocking statistics. Then I wore a black shirt, stood in front of the camera making sure to cover my face with hair and changed a4 papers one by one to introduce the audience to the story. When the story has finished I deliberately added one flickering transition to the video to show how our character died as a result of domestic abuse. I wanted to show that she died because of being silent and not telling anyone. Here, I connected the silence with death. After that part, to aesthetically show the woman’s life before and after violence I wore Kazakh national clothing with an old jewellery that I got from my grandmother as a heritage and again dressed in black, now with clusters of bruises on my face.