Artist Portrait No. 17: Vivian Säde (filmmaker)

This is an episode of the old podcast, called Artists on the Verge. I decided to keep these conversations up in the feed because they are, in fact, part of what led me to create Classically (Un)Trained. I have taken down all except the artist interviews - but you can check out an expanded archive here: https://classicallyuntrainedpodcast.com/former-podcast-archive/ Check out the current podcast here: https://classicallyuntrainedpodcast.com/ Vivian Säde is a twenty-four-year-old Estonian/intercontinental filmmaker in the very beginning of her career. I was connected with her by another guest to this podcast, Malena Dayen (whom you can hear in episode 4), when I was looking for someone to work with on a short film. I found that Vivian’s sensibility, unpretentiously influenced by pop culture, is a perfect counterbalance to a potentially overly-serious short musical film written around a monodrama for unaccompanied soprano by contemporary American composer Juliana Hall and text by Caitlin Vincent. Vivian and I talk about the difficulty of breaking into filmmaking, about walking the line between popular entertainment and high art, about the Americanization of storytelling, and about our joint film project and how it ties into issues of feminine identity in the public eye, among other things. Vivian's website: https://vivianfilms.com/ This is the first episode on which I used music from the Free Music Archive. The piece in this episode is by Monplaisir, called "Lid" from the album Kitchen Table: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Monplaisir/ 💋👁👂🏼 Website: https://onthevergetrilogy.com/