Filmform (est. 1950) is dedicated to preservation, promotion and worldwide distribution of experimental film and video art. Constantly expanding, the distribution catalogue spans from 1924 to the present, including works by Sweden’s most prominent artists and filmmakers, available to rent for public screenings and exhibitions as well as for educational purposes.
In Maria Buyondo’s film An Attempt to Make a Perfect Play, the main character is her grandmother, more than 80 years old.
The film begins and finishes with a scene from the Drottningholm Palace Theatre, where her grandmother performs as the opera singer she dreamed of becoming. Narrated in between is the story of her life in the Soviet Union, as a celebrated actress whose career was curtailed by external circumstances. Through a montage-like technique, Maria Buyondo brings together interviews with her grandmother made in recent years, with excerpts from diaries and Super 8 film footage made in the 1960s by a family member. The story unfurls through a dialogue between two women from different generations, however faced with questions about her past, the grandmother has difficulty separating the various periods of time from each other. What occurs on stage and in song, is the sudden amalgamation of present and past.
Born in 1982 in Moscow, Russia. Grew up in Stockholm, Sweden, where she is still based.
Maria Buyondo is an artist and filmmaker working with documentary and experimental films. Buyondo received her Master in Fine Art Photography, in 2016 at Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. She has exhibited work at Gothenburg Konsthall, Cecilia Hillström Gallery, Center for photography (CFF), Frame Film Festival, Smack Mellon in NY, the Bronx Museum in NY, Winkleman Gallery in NY, Women’s History Month film festival in Newark, First Floor Gallery Harare, in Zimbabwe, and On the ground floor gallery in Los Angeles, among others.
Buyondo has participated in a number of residency programs including the Bronx Museum’s AIM program in 2008, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009, Smack Mellon from 2010-2011, Aljira Emerge Eleven in 2013, A-I-R at CPW in Woodstock 2013, Creative collaboration, Nida art Colony in 2015 and I-Park Foundation in 2016.
