Public Figure (Film made in collaboration with poet and performer Ryan Ormonde)

2021, 9.43 mins

‘Public Figure’ is a lyrical account of a body in space, a metrical composition in which poet Ryan Ormonde is carefully observed and re-imagined by Zaharia’s cinematic eye. Through this exchange, the poet and the onlooker are collectively staging a particular sense of ‘publicness’, a certain type of relationship that relies heavily on the tension between the body and the voice, and has its source in practices of embodied poetry and writing. The film is guided by the changing and wavering voice of the poet, a voice completely independent from the body and at the same time in restless search for a physical host, following its presence around the fictitious and dreamlike set of a domestic interior.