The cooking up something good photo series is a music video storyboard for Mac DeMarco's song "Cooking Up Something good." The song is a commentary on Demarco's life dragging on, accentuated by his emotional numbness. Demarco's father sits on the sofa, "pride of the neighborhood," yet his addiction has turned him into a ghostly presence.
In my interpretation of his lyrics, the setting of the bathroom expresses the reflection that becomes apparent as we move through our daily routines. The bathroom is a place of decompression for most, an escape from the realities of life. Specifically while under the comfort of warm bath water, sounds are muted and for a moment the current state of life pauses. Nuclear family bath toys disintegrate as the time passes and we are brought back into reality as the water drains.

Pravets film Festival

The First Annual Pravets Film Festival was held at 20:00 on May 31st, 2019 at the Chitalishte in Pravets. The Chitalishte provided a regal setting for the Pravets Film Festival, as Bulgarian high school students from all across the country posed for photos on the red carpet, watched their films on the big screen and spoke about their films in front of a large audience when they were awarded a trophy by the Pravets Film Festival board of international judges. The Pravets Film Festival was founded by Shauna Ricketts, the English Teaching Assistant at Aleko Konstantinov Foreign Language High School in Pravets. The Film Festival has been made possible by a Fulbright Grant.

The mission behind the Pravets Film Festival is to give students across Bulgaria a supportive environment to exercise creativity through film, while providing feedback from credible individuals who work in the industry. The Pravets Film Festival challenges students to think innovatively by providing an open ended prompt, which required them to produce a three to four minute short film that incorporated at least 3 elements from a list of twenty. The element list was strategically crafted to encourage story development, character depth and scene variation through the interpretation of abstract and material elements.

To make this film festival as beneficial as possible, international filmmakers, artists, photographers, screenwriters and people who work in the film industry were recruited as judges to rank the films. The festival utilized the expertise of 15 judges from all over the world, including Bulgaria, the United States, France, Canada and Germany. The students received individualized feedback from the judges who were responsible for ranking their films.

Maximilian Forster, a German philosopher, artist, 2019-2020 Fulbrighter at UNC Chapel Hill and a Pravets Film Festival judge, was a guest speaker at the festival. Max’s speech reflected on the subconscious political messages that are absorbed by audiences and perpetuated by filmmakers. In his speech, he cited the Turkish Netflix series, The Wolves, Hitler’s use of film propaganda and the Me Too Movement.

The second Pravets Film Festival was organized remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2020 films can be viewed on the Pravets Film Festival YouTube.