Man looks at Woman, Woman looks at Man
1999, 18 mins, 35mm, b&w and color
Direction, Scenario, Casting, Editing: Nathalie Alonso Casale and Pavel Semčenko
Production: Titanic Production

Inspired by a story from the Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić. Franco-Spanish director, producer, writer and actor Nathalie Alonso Casale (1970) created the short film Man looks at Woman, Woman looks at Man (1999) together with director, filmmaker, visual artist, founder of AKHE theatre and actor Pavel Semčenko from St. Petersburg. Consisting of a loose adaptation of a short story by the writer Milodar Pavić, the film is a sequence of magical-realism images. An early version of the film was captured by Semčenko and Casale on black and white 16mm film during a residency in the Center for Metamedia at Plasy. The film was finalized in Rotterdam on 35mm color film. The work premiered at the Rotterdam film festival in 2000.

In the beginning of the 1990s, the authors of Engineering Theatre AKHE created a series of striking experimental performative films amid the anarchistic art community of a squat at 10 Puškynskaja street. Alonso Casale has collaborated with the AKHE ensemble as a manager, and together they also made the experimental short film Siesta la Tetera y la Rosa! (1997) in Spain. In 1992 Alonso Nathale received the Golden Calf for Best Short Film at the Netherlands Film Festival for her Memorias Sin Batallas y Otros Muertos.

Nathalie Alonso Casale (b. 1970 in Paris) is filmmaker and actres, she moved to Holland in 1974. In 1972, she graduated from the Dutch Film and Television Academy with the widely praised Memorias sin batallas.

Her feature debut, Memory of the Unknown (1995), was included in the VPRO Tiger Awards Competition. Figner, the End of a Silent Century (2006), her second feature, screened both in Rotterdam and Locarno. She is also an actress, for instance in El acto en cuestion by Alejandro Agresti and Guernsey by Nanouk Leopold. Besides this she is active as an editor and since 2017, she also works as a consultant for the Netherlands Film Fund.

Filmography

De vader (1990, short), Grootvader Doodgraver (1991, short), Memorias sin Batallas (1992, short), Memoria de lo desconocido/Memory of the Unknown (1995), 11th of November, St. Petersburg (2001, short), 17th of March (2003, short), La casa (2004), Figner, The End of a Silent Century (2006), Music for Bicycle Landscapes (2008), Hammada (2009, short), Interview with German (2015), Juste des choses (2017, short)