Flora & Oizys (the film)

After diving into the sea, in a meditative state, and succumbing to the depths of depression, a woman gives birth to the physical personification of her struggles and is called to navigate the new reality. This is just the beginning of her journey. This marriage of digital and 16mm cinematography is a short snippet of a larger live multimedia performance that unfolds alongside projected imagery.

"Aneta Parpouli is an experimental dance filmmaker, multimedia performance artist, and choreographer, born and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece, and based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her interdisciplinary practice combines dance, film, text, oral storytelling, and sound into multimedia performance to explore themes related to human nature, identity, mental health, embodiment, memory, and interpersonal relationships. Drawing on both cinematic and choreographic languages, she creates hybrid narrative forms that often blur the boundaries between reality and hyperreality and aim to reimagine anachronistic notions regarding those themes. Her work is particularly interested in the relationship between the moving body, the camera, and live performance, exploring how screen and stage can coexist within the same narrative space. Her practice investigates the dialogue between the permanence of film and the ephemeral nature of live dance performance. Through hybrid multimedia forms, she examines how bodies can simultaneously exist on screen and on stage, how different spaces communicate different parts of the same story, and how proximity, audience engagement, improvisation, and the performers’ physical and emotional states transform each iteration of a work into a distinct experience. She holds a bachelor’s Degree in Film Studies from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, an MFA in Film and Media Arts with an integrated Screendance Certificate from the University of Utah, and completed her ballet and contemporary dance educator studies at the Higher Vocational Dance School, Evmorfia Fyllida Mantziari. She is currently pursuing an MA in Design in Special Effects and Animation from the Hellenic Open University. She worked as a dance instructor and choreographer from 2015 to 2022, and as a Film Instructor in the Film and Media Arts Department at the University of Utah from 2022 to 2026. Finally, she has founded the contemporary dance group B. area 4 in 2016. Her film tr(ip)eat, which is a production by B. area 4, was awarded the best short dance film at the Cult Movies International Film Festival in 2021."