Clare’s Decision Not to Get Up

There’s something savagely beautiful about Teona Galgoțiu’s graduation film from the Friedl Kubelka School for Independent Film – a sensibility that’s too poetic to be brat, and too brat to be poetic. Much like a shy Actionist, Galgoțiu places Clare laying on all sorts of urban margins of Vienna – on a sidewalk, on a patch of grass, on the edge of a U-Bahn station –, her defiant horizontality freeze-framing it all, resisting contemporaneity by a serious game. Shot after shot, it’s as if Clare’s Decision Not to Get Up rediscovered the greatest of intensity in slowness. (Călin Boto)