Jessica Sarah Rinland, The Flight of an Ostrich (Schools Interior) (2016), UK
Birds are masters of the sky. The ostrich is incapable of doing the one thing birds are famous for – they cannot fly. They compensate their impotence by having the largest eyes and by being the fastest birds on land, seldom caught by predators. The Flight of an Ostrich (Schools Interior) links this description of the ostrich to a moment during the life of a chin-down, shy eight-year-old girl who, while watching an educational video about ostriches, grasps an opportunity and flies in the face of her peer group.
About Jessica Sarah Rinland
Argentine-British artist filmmaker, JESSICA SARAH RINLAND is a recipient of numerous prizes including Special Mention at Locarno Film Festival and Best Film at DocumentaMadrid, Primer Premio at BIM – Bienale de Imagen en Movimiento, Arts + Science Award at Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Schnitzer prize for excellence in the arts in 2017. Her work has been exhibited at University of Tennessee’s Downtown Gallery, Southwark Park Galleries, Taipei Biennial, Somerset House and Bloomberg New Contemporaries.
She has had retrospectives of her films at Anthology Film Archives, Doc’s Kingdom, Aricadoc, Eureka Film Festival, Curtocircuito, London Short Film Festival and Flaherty Film Seminar. Residencies include Film Studies Center at Harvard University, Somerset House Studios, Flaherty Seminar Fellow, MacDowell, and Ikusmira Berriak. Her films are held in the British Film Institute’s collections.
She currently works as an educator at Harvard Summer School and Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, previously at UCL, Wellesley College and Kingston University, and as a freelance cinematographer and projectionist at the Barbican Center. She holds a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London and a MSc in Arts, Culture and Technology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.