Anna Biller is an independent American filmmaker. She is known for her visual style, and for her use of period genres and satire. Her 2007 sexploitation feature film Viva premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and won the Best of Fest Award at the Boston Underground Film Festival. The film was also entered into the main competition at the 29th Moscow International Film Festival.Reason magazine called Viva an "uncannily precise rendition of the look, sound, mood, and arch dialogue" of seventies sexploitation films, with "high-key, pseudo-Technicolor lighting and spare, colorful set design." Biller's work follows in the tradition of the few women to work in the sexploitation genre, along with Doris Wishman and Stephanie Rothman.
Film is like sex. Film fulfills all my expectations, all my fetishes. Video doesn't satisfy anything for me. If I couldn't work on film anymore, I would just go back to painting or writing, or writing music. I'd just stop making films.
2
I'm less interested now in making the audience aware that they're watching a movie, but that's because I've been misunderstood a lot. I don't want it to be a joke. I'm very frustrated when people find my movies to be a joke, because of the artifice. They're real stories about real things. I'd like to take away that block. But I don't know if I can, due to my natural campiness and my personal tastes.
3
The first thing that I want is for the visuals to look great, sensual and colorful and for the sound to be great. You get more sophisticated when you learn more. You can make the artifice more and more and more subtle and combine it with a naturalistic approach. But it gets tricky. My first efforts are crudest. As I get better, it's going to seem more conventional. But conventions are fetishes for me. The more conventional I become, the stranger the films are.
#
Fact
1
Retrospective at the 16th New Horizons Film Festival (2016).
$16 Million
