The Dressmaker:
The Dressmaker is about Marie, a dressmaker who is afraid of losing her memories and thereby forgetting everything she loves in life. So she decides to do something about it and starts a diary, especially for the benefit of her mother who is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
The Dressmaker is made by Inma Carpe Pérez, who is originally from Spain, but has lived in Denmark for several years now.
The Dressmaker, Remnants of a Life is a short film about memories of a life and Alzheimer’s disease. The film’s major topic is memories, and it is therefore a creative investigation of personal identity – what makes us human. Because what happens if we lose our memories? What happens to our personalities? Diseases like Alzheimer’s destroy memories and quietly drain the lives of loved ones until you and they cannot recognize each other anymore. Dramatic as it may seem, the narrative is life-affirming. And highlights the importance of each second of one’s life. Each smell and touch, like patches sewed in a lifetime. The filmmaker takes her starting point in some moments picked from her mother’s diary – a mother who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. The short film is therefore a very personal project.
The film’s visual side consists of mixed media, and quite a lot of energy goes into researching textiles and fabrics, and how they can be used to tell a story and communicate feelings. Each remnant is a piece of cloth which then acts as a memento of a past experience. The piece of cloth triggers a memory and serves as a visual diary. The look of The Dressmaker is inspired by Hollywood and the golden era. The film has now gone into production and is being animated. Music for the film was recorded during Easter 2011 in the Open Workshop studio. Inma has made some contacts in L.A., where she is working with an actor who is doing voice-over, and another friend who is helping her promote the film in L.A. at the moment.
Inma holds a degree in Fine Art, with 2D animation as her area of expertise, from San Carles Faculty, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia in Spain. She participated in an international Animation Master class in Halle in Germany and the master class ‘3D artist for feature films and video games’ at The Animation Workshop. Inma has worked as a teacher at Universidad Politecnica Valencia in Spain, as a 2D animator at Fernseh Akademie Mitteldeutchland in Germany, as well as for the VOOdooDOG studio in London. Inma Carpe’s previous film Prayer in the Night (2008) has been well received at festivals around the world.
