Elena Pachner Sarno

Elena is a filmmaker with several years of tuition and experience on film sets as Continuity and Camera. Her writer/director works spanning documentary, narrative and experimental films, have participated and won prizes in festivals around the world. The Catalinas Project, began in 2022 with Catalina meets the pope, is an ongoing experimental film collage which follows important incursions in academia - a PhD on playfulness in Film and Art and a Master in Performance Art. The Project, inspired by Catalina de Erauso, continues with She who lives by the sword (2024) and If these walls could talk, in postproduction. Elena is a queer and feminist activist and her productions, whether performances, audiovisuals, research or hybrids (her favourites) work towards radical social and cultural change. The tools she prefers to create her works as affirmative, engaged and engaging actions are primal play and unbound imagination. Her films are the fruit of complex co-creative processes maximising inventive storytelling. She creates films and videos, site-specific play-installations and dry-land synchronised swimming street performances. Elena’s multifaceted experiences cover also her geographies, she was born and raised in Italy and has lived in Spain, Australia and Holland.