Today we’d like to introduce you to Hannah Panov.
Hi Hannah, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I’m a filmmaker, installation, and performance artist who works in aesthetics of camp, mysticism, and digital communities to publicize the rage that comes with growing up as a girl.
I grew up in Toronto, where I was deeply engaged with the performing arts. I was part of a performance company that produced several shows every year – most of which were over-the-top musicals that likely used the city’s entire glitter supply. When I began to transition into filmmaking, I tried hard to make “serious” work, informed not by my own interests but by what I thought a proper film had to be. I aimed only for an immediate masterpiece and often lost my desire to make the film in the process. In search of a new approach, I moved to Los Angeles to enroll in CalArts’ Program in Film/Video, where my practice significantly shifted to something more experimental that allowed me to play with different forms and techniques. I began to let myself have fun with what I was making, and that quickly became a return to being young through the glamour of my theatrical background.
Since then, I’ve been working primarily in the teen genre. I was raised on teen movies, and I believe that teen girls have enough power as audience members to truly define popular culture. However, the films made for and about them are not always reflective of their experiences. I aim to make work that is not only conscious of but embraces the complexities of being a teenage girl. My films explore these complexities through the lens of horror to allow the young female characters to act on their anger and overwhelming emotions without facing the consequences. They are over-the-top and outrageously campy – filled with all the things we’ve decided teen girls should love (and that I love).
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Teen movies require an extreme level of consciousness and care behind the choices you make. Many of these films can be exploitative or sexualized in a way that ultimately takes the power away from the protagonists. I want my films to feel radical to the teenage girl, but it is certainly a fine line to walk. I struggled a lot with the process of my film #AlwaysInOurHeartsZaynMalik – A found-footage documentary made up of videos posted online following the news of Zayn’s departure from One Direction in 2015. The outpour of grief for something that appeared so ridiculous was unlike anything I had seen before. It was so intense that I remember some of my friends getting the news and not being able to come to school the next day. Online, there were countless girls who threatened self-harm and went completely unnoticed by anyone other than that community. It felt almost voyeuristic to watch these videos so long after their creation. It was clear that many of these girls had abandoned their accounts and likely forgot about what they had posted.
Compiling those videos felt like a violation of the community’s trust, and I was worried that making these clips relevant again would feel exploitative since I was unearthing something that had been buried deep in the social media archives. However, it quickly became clear that the overwhelming emotional experience these girls had was not an isolated event. This patronization and simultaneous commodification of the teenage girl has always existed, so it felt necessary for me to summarize the event from their perspective rather than in the way adults have chosen to remember it. This conflict is at the core of everything I make, but I believe it is an important conversation for me to have with myself when starting a new project. If you’re making work about teenage girls, you have to have clear motivations, and you have to be doing it for their sake.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I work with film, projection, and video installation. With a tendency to center teenage fantasy and mysticism as ways to investigate and manipulate the tools of adoration, I want to know what devotion would look like if it were something you could inhale, hold in your hand, or hang up on the wall. I attempt to give this adoration a physical form using desktop filmmaking, projector performance, and over-the-top narratives because, to me, they are modes with a strong ability to make absolute fabrication feel natural – they give me a chance to put on a magic show.
My thesis film, ‘Bitches Kill Bitches’, is currently making its way through the festival circuit. It is a horror/musical/comedy extravaganza that follows a group of best friends through the aftermath of a breakup call at their first sleepover and the outrageously bloody revenge plot that leads them to sisterhood. I wanted to make a film that lives in conversation with the most transgressive teen movies by creating autonomous characters that the audience believes in, even though their choices are deliberately immoral. It’s an opportunity for girls to express their deepest rage and not face consequences for it.
‘Devour the Image, It Tastes like Smoke’, is an installation which first previewed in the spring of 2023. Using open-source security cameras and public live streams, I attempt to conjure a ghost in the image and project it back into the space in three dimensions. When the viewer enters the space, they are encouraged to walk through the piece and interact with it from within. They are breathing in the image, and it becomes a part of them. Just as the narrator calls out to a past love who has become lost in digital space, the audience takes on a new form by force.
We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
It’s interesting because I feel like my comfort zone is a very risky one. The themes I engage with are filled with complicated intricacies, especially when addressed through girlhood. I grew up with a quickly developing internet landscape, so these mass expressions of devotion, confusion, and rage were a part of my everyday life in my digital communities but not yet defined. As I said before, the emotions of young girls are rarely taken seriously, especially in regard to adoration, so I now have the unique opportunity to become a historian and documentarian of that era to make sure that these girls are understood. It can definitely be a risk to make work within a genre and for an audience that is not properly validated outside of itself, but that is what excites me the most about it. I do not want to recognize the patriarchal forces that shame teenage girls for their interests without working against them or participate in a genre that makes work for an audience that it refuses to accurately represent. I want to be a part of a reinvigorated feminist cinema that develops its own language and operates independently from its predecessors in order to discover a new cinematic relationship for women.
I guess you can call that a risk, haha.
Pricing:
- 35/h – projection
Contact Info:
- Website: www.neutralgoose.com
- Instagram: neutralgoose
- Other: https://vimeo.com/hannahpanov
Image Credits
Zaarya Chaudhari Valentina Rosset Sam Greco
