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| Poster artwork for the documentary film Through The Eyes of Ouka Leele (La mirada de Ouka Leele). |
Moving
Mural by Linh
Through
The Eyes of Ouka Leele (La
mirada de Ouka Leele) is a Spanish documentary filmed over five years, and
allows the audience to observe painter and photographer Ouka Leele (real name
Bárbara Allende Gil de Viedma) as she paints a 300 square metre mural on stone
in the city of Ceuti Murcia. The documentary combines scenes of Ouka Leele as
she works on the mural with flashbacks covering more than forty years of her
work, childhood, and family life from home video or archival media footage.
Director Rafael Gordon provides an intimate and humourous
look into Ouka Leele’s work and her personality in Through The Eyes of Ouka Leele (La
mirada de Ouka Leele); curiously it is filmed through Gordon’s eyes but
from Ouka Leele’s perspective. He shows her at work, at play and with all the
insecurities about being an artist whose work is under the microscope for art critics
and the general public.
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COLOURFUL: Ouka
Leele adores bright colours as well as black and white imagery. Image: Rafael
Gordon Productions.
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The film opens with a young Barbara wearing a piglet’s
carcass on her head, where the piglet’s eyes and mouth are filled with
lightbulbs, which lights up via batteries installed inside the piglet’s body.
It was part of her art exhibition which included a man wearing a dead squid on
his head to look like a wig.
Ouka Leele paints photographs and uses pencil, chalk or
paintbrush to create her artworks. She loves colour and enjoys blending them to
create numerous shades and tones depending on the type of mood she wishes to
express to her audience or evoke from the viewer.
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PERSERVERANCE: Ouka
Leele almost finishes her giant mural in the documentary film Through The Eyes of Ouka Leele (La mirada de Ouka Leele). Image: Rafael
Gordon Productions.
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Ouka Leele speaks fondly of memories as a child living at
home where there were woods nearby, and the place would inspire ideas whenever
she went there. She describes the woods as possessing a feeling of
“cathedral-ness” and the tall trees reminded her of priests whose beliefs were
rooted into the ground like the trees. These appear more spiritual than
religious to her and she found inspiration while being in the woods. Her
motivation to paint is spurred by a natural curiosity and open-mindedness to
all possibilities. There is no barrier to her ideas or her style and she loves
the universal language of visual art and its many different interpretations by
different people.
Ouka Leele is an artist who seeks to bring timelessness,
mysticism and public discourse to her work and the documentary is a testament
that her artwork will continue to confound and be enjoyed many years to come.
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COMPLETION: Ouka
Leele adds the finishing touches to her mural in the documentary film Through The Eyes of Ouka Leele (La mirada de Ouka Leele). Image: Rafael
Gordon Productions.
|
Director:
Rafael Gordon
Writer: Rafael
Gordon
Cast:
Ouke Leele
Producers:
Rafael Gordon, Sergio García de Leaniz
Cinematographer:
Julio Madurga
Original
Music Composers: Eva Gancedo, Jorge Magaz
Film
Editor: Íñigo Madurga
Language:
Spanish with English subtitles
Running
Time: 1 hour and 57 minutes
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