Open air screening – Meet Helga Fanderl

Open air screening and Q&A with artist Helga Fanderl is organized by the Institut Audiovisuel de Monaco in conjunction with the NMNM exhibition “The Feeling of Nature” (Villa Paloma, February 13 to May 25, 2026) on Thursday 21 May 2026 at 7 pm.

German filmmaker Helga Fanderl (born in 1947) shoots all her films on Super 8, on a single reel, without any post-production processing: no editing, no sound, no titles. The creative process takes place entirely on location: the camera is both the tool and the medium of this immediate experience. “With my eye glued to the viewfinder, camera in hand, I perceive and record simultaneously,” she explains. Her films, attentive to the subtle nuances of reality, depict less an objective reality than an inner landscape. “I think my love for poetry has profoundly influenced me; my films are intimate, far removed from epics.”

Since 1986, Helga Fanderl has made nearly a thousand films, each a fleeting moment preserved in its evanescent brilliance, offering viewers a renewed way of seeing the world, akin to the sensibility of childhood. At each invitation from a museum, film archive, or festival, she draws from her vast collection of images and composes a unique program: an ephemeral “film,” an ordered sequence of Super 8 or 16mm reels, which she projects herself alongside the audience.

For her “Monaco” screening, entitled Plein air (Outdoors), the artist reveals her “feeling for nature as seen through the lens of Nicolas Poussin” through a programming approach she describes as “a dense and ethereal fabric of correspondences and contrasts between themes, colors, rhythms, and textures.”

Estelle Macé