Images from 2000s music videos are transferred onto the film strip, torn and abstracted until the visuals convulse and shift—a tactile, poetic exploration of materiality, memory, and medium.
Sound by Yusuf Huysal
World Premiere as part of Short & Mid Programme at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, NL (IFFR)
Onion City Experimental Film Festival / Is this thing on? / 3-6 April 2025, Chicago, US
Xposed Queer Film Festival / Shorts 4 / 30 May 2025, Berlin, DE
Leiden Shorts / International Competition 5: The Personal is Political / 1 & 3 June 2025, Leiden, NL
video installation at vitruta / 7 June 2025, London, UK
Goodnight, Captain Midnight! / 9 August 2025, Holy Trinity Church, London, UK
There’s No Cloud (There Is Always Someone Else’s Computer) by Video Club / 31 August 2025 at Spore Initiative, Berlin, DE
Bad Art presents ‘Fandom’ / 5 September 2025, London Art Services, London, UK
‘Rethinking Archive in 21st Century Cinema’ / 10 September 2025 at Kiraathane Istanbul Edebiyat Evi, Istanbul, TR
Festival Nouveau Cinéma de Montréal / Les nouveaux alchimistes Competition 1 / 9 and 14 October 2025, Quebec, Canada
“(...) I must re-tense the bodies of the idols that Ela Kazdal seeks to distend in her * If You Seek Amy* . Pop idols we know all too well or all too poorly, but whose presence exerts a fascination through another kind of image regime—this time saturated, intensifying, concentrated in themselves, combative, and alienating. Fergie, Britney, Justin, Beyoncé, Katy: we know these bodies, and these bodies reach us in an ever-controversial hollow at the heart of images. Because, precisely, these bodies are constructed by monstrous iconic systems, while we search, despite ourselves, for the person behind the sculpted flesh, the choreographed movement, the existential aesthetic—everything we can grasp of what resembles us or sets us apart from them. Bodies that elicit pleasure from adoration, hatred, and even indifference, since even from this perspective, they will reach us sooner or later. Media and personal bodies, which sing and give themselves to varying degrees in Instagram and TikTok profiles that reprogram contact with the star, now forcing them into coexistences that can relativize them but also give rise to new forms of deepening their effects of identification. It is these glorified bodies that Ela Kazdal's very short film tackles.”
“(...) She tackles this by precisely re-subjecting the regime of images through which glorified bodies reach us—our phones, our screens—to a set of procedures that mockingly shift their transitive efficacy. Thus, the close-ups of Fergie, Britney, Justin kissing a partner, Beyoncé, are presented to us captured in effects of film transfer and pointillism achieved through the use of adhesive vinyl, freeze-frames, and image scrolling via a strip of photograms passing before our eyes and within the sonic lacerations of the song " If I Seek Amy," Spears' hit that gives the film its title. Ela Kazdal texturizes and weaves the star in depth, as if to make her a pattern, as if to make her lace, if we consider the insert of this strip of fabric also scrolling before our eyes. This scrolling, in particular, will remind us of the scrolling motion on our phones, in addition to the white margins of the image evoking comment sections on social media and the very appearance of the phone motif in the clips selected by the director. The halftone opacity of the star's image, this blurring still imbued with veneration, thus responds to a reflection on a certain gesture of consumption, slowed down, highlighted, and displaced towards the vertical movement of the frames. If You Seek Amy thus pokes fun at a certain voraciousness of the image by anchoring the impossible quest for the idol to a discreet form of self-criticism.”
- Maude Trottier, Passages Between Shorts, FNC 2025
"The seductive gazes with which Fergie, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Beyoncé and Katy Perry once pierced the camera, reach us through a whirlwind of reproduction and deformation. Their images deconstructed so far that halftone dots become visible, their iconic Y2K pop hits collapsed into faintly recognisable reverberations. Using 16 and 35mm film, vinyl stickers, photograms and lace, Ela Kazdal dissects the pop star as media object, tracing its allure through layers of distortion and decay.”
- Loes van Keulen, IFFR 2025
A two-minute whirlwind of halftone dots, photograms, vinyl stickers and lace, the film deconstructs iconic pop stardom—into faint, flickering reverberations.
- Gigi Surel, Teaspoon Projects, 2025
Combining 16mm and 35mm film, vinyl stickers, photograms, and lace, the filmmaker prints a strange remix of 2000s music videos that threaten to overtake their subjects by filmstrip a la Tscherkassky’s seminal Outer Space (1999).
- Onion City Experimental Film Festival, 2025