2022 /

The Butterfly
Effect

The Butterfly Effect navigates within the new geopolitical realities we live in and speculates upon a sensory experience of a territory only known through digital imageries. It suggests a future in which Humanity will be able to experience any kind of territory regardless of the spectrum of perception, time and geography, by enabling bystanders to physically engage with remote colonies.
The work investigates an immersive form of design that can emulate interplanetary narratives, crossing over technology as archeology of our time, and what constitutes the DNA of any planet: geology.

Winner of the Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant, Nominee Idfa DocLab Immersive Non-Fiction Competition. Supported by AFK, Netherlands FilmFund, The Stimuleringsfonds Creative Industry, ILEWG EuroMoonMars & Art Moon Mars.

→ Team

Mathilde Renault - Producer, artist
Bernard Foing - Advisor senior scientist
European Space Research & Technology Centre
Sebastiaan de Vet - Advisor planetary
geomorphologist TU Delft Aerospace engineering
Frank Bloem - Perfumer
Lefki Mevissen - Programmer
Tatiana Rosa - Sound designer
Daniel Nunes - Web developer
Rita Fiahlo - UX-UI designer

2021 /

Eclipse

J.G. Ballard once said, “I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring.” And this author of science fiction may have had a point, if our future is to be shaped by huge technology companies that exploit every potential existing innovation for banal, purely commercial applications.
Eclipse offers an antidote in the form of a virtual reality universe that raises fundamental, existential questions. Alless and Lena are both moving around in this universe, but at such different levels of consciousness that they can’t actually see each other - all they can find are traces of each other’s presence. But by following and analysing these traces, they can decode the thoughts and feelings of “the other”.

Two actors bring Alless and Lena to life in a live VR experience that gives a new and radical meaning to diversity: here, “the other” isn’t a variation on our self - it exists in an entirely different reality. The accompanying website serves as a manual that complements the VR environment. Its as yet undiscovered features generate the story.

Supported by the Stimulering Fonds NL, Nederlands Film Fonds, Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst.

→ Team

Ali Eslami – Director, Producer, Developer
Mathilde Renault – Co-director,
Scenographer
Alap Parikh – Technical Artist, Developer
Maisa Imamović – Web Artist
Barthelemy Vielle – Graphic Design
Rein Blank – 3D Artist
Jason Mohaaghegh – Advisor
Shahin Entezami – Sound Design, Music
Pedro Matias – Physical Portals
Sjoerd Mol – Assistant, Video
Pierre Nivière – Video Documentation

→ False Mirror website

→ Tetem

→ Dutch Design award
→ IDFA DocLab premiere

2021 /

The Voluntary
Psychopomp

After the sudden loss of her father, Mayra Sergio attempted to find new ways to process grief. Looking for strategies, she took a DNA test. The DNA of one individual can tell vastly about the history of colonization, immigration, and cultural exchanges. While visiting key ancestral locations she explored local grieving rituals.
Mixing scientific data about the neuroscience of ritual and Brazilian genetics with the rawness that can only derive from first person accounts, the three-channel film portrays a contemporary psychopomp as a craftswoman.

Supported by the Mondriaan Fonds, Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst.

   → Team

   Mayra Sergio - Producer, co-director
Mathilde Renault - Co-director,
     cinematographer, editor
Pierre-Clément Nivière - Camera operator,
   colour grader
   Andrés García Vidal - Sound designer
Niels Hendricks - Special effect supervisor
     Marlieke Burghouts - Choreographer
Michelle Son - Subtitles, Voice over
Laura Dubourjal - Voiceover
   Daan Simons - Charpenter advisor
Arthur Guilleminot - Costume designer

   → Arti et Amiticea

2020 /

They said,
I was never an island

Let it be understood that enormous cotton-candy clouds don’t come along every day of the week, and when you have an opportunity to get up close to one, you ought to go on and get up close, because you’re only here once, as far as you or any one of us may ever know for certain, and you just can’t tell when you’ll have another chance to engage in this way, on this level, with this kind of thing. So, look around, inhale all the way, expand and contract rhythmically until you become a soft, sweaty rock, insides out, flirting your face off in the flowering colored lights of the abstract documentary that is the mutual rubbing of every virtual opposite redisassembled in the psychedelic combustion of vital transforomance. _ Angie Keefer

→ Team

Pedro Matias - Producer, Visual artist
Mathilde Renault - Filmmaker, Editor
Tatiana Rosa - Sound designer

→ Works

→ Info

Mathilde Renault

STONE BY STONE