ZOE WILLIAMS — Sunday Fantasy
12.09.2019
The new film by Zoe Williams (2019, 31 min.) follows a fragmented, dreamlike narrative centred around the character Veronica Malaise, who is played by 4 interchangeable women. The discontented Veronica finds an ancient, glass, scent bottle in the shape of a shell, on a beach near the mouth of the Thames Estuary. The bottle is possessed by the spirit of its previous owner, a fictional lesbian priestess from the Roman Empire, who used it to distil and realise her erotic fantasies. When rubbed on the nape of the neck or the genitals, the bottle has the power to make real the fantasies of the person possessing it. The film charts the non-linear journey of the Veronicas and the rise and demise of their fantasies through the manipulation of the bottle.
The film plays with dissecting current representations of the erotic through an importantly female and queered lens, as well as examining problematised subject/object relations. Challenging the idea of singular authorship, Williams has worked with her friends and collaborators; Amy Gwatkin, Deniz Ünal and Nadja Voorham on the construction of the film, inviting them to enact their own and each other’s fantasies within it. The film is co-directed by filmmaker Amy Gwatkin, with a soundtrack by musician David Aird.
