Marcelle Abela is a Maltese-American writer-director and the sole filmmaker in the history of Jerry Rudes’s prestigious Cinemonde series in New York City to have two films chosen for screening. Her documentaries have won recognition at several international film festivals and her science short films have been accepted into the official archives of the European Space Agency.

Marcelle has received seven best picture awards in Beijing, Los Angeles, Rome, Pune, and Saint Petersburg; one award for best editing and twenty-three nominations for her work in film, including for best female director and best original concept. Her films have been screened in the US, Europe, China, India, Japan, and the Russian Federation. They have also been broadcast in America.

A violinist and the author of ten books, one of which received praise from Barack Obama, Marcelle is particularly inspired in her filmmaking journey by the works of Werner Herzog, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Hans Zimmer. At present Marcelle is in production on her debut feature film Mikha’El, the first historically accurate docudrama on the great archangel in cinema history.

Director Statement

NOTE: Please watch “Creation” in 4K with pro-grade sound equipment for its full effect. Thank you.

FIVE MOST FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS OF MARCELLE ABELA ABOUT ‘CREATION’

Q: How did you come to make CREATION?
A: Music is the foundation of this film. I had been wanting for a year to do a film about creation: its unparalleled beauty, but also its dark underbelly. The opposites that characterized and continue to characterize the process of creation itself. So when Peter (Cavallo) sent me the tracks of his latest album Of night and light and the half light (2019), I knew they were perfect for the film as they captured its essence in the way I had envisioned. Peter had written his music inspired by Yeats’ poem He wishes for the cloths of heaven. Further, the poignancy of Peter’s and Joni’s solo playing added a lot to the inherent flavor of CREATION, which together with the picture and the sound design, brilliantly potentiated and brought out by Mirko (Sukovic) in the mix, have given the film its stark eloquence.

Q:What made you create a film that explores the tension between order and life versus chaos and death?
A: Life is all about diametrical opposites even though we try to smooth it out as much as possible by looking for the gray areas; the middle of life, if you will. But that is not life. It is mere existence. You cannot have life without death, order without preceding disorder, light without darkness, beauty without ugliness, creation without destruction (and re-creation), passivity without activity, and calmness without battle. CREATION is all about foregrounding and recognizing those ever-present realities we so like to ignore or deny in our everyday attempts to make ourselves as comfortable as possible in a world we do not fully comprehend.

Q: What made you decide to cast the film with non-traditional characters?
A: The vast majority of films in cinema history have been predominantly based on the WASP aesthetic or geared toward that sensibility in true impero-colonialistic fashion, although that particular dynamic has been slowly changing over recent years. I cast CREATION primarily with an Asian girl, an Asian man and woman, a pregnant young woman (with her pregnancy foregrounded through the sound design of the film), and a very old lady in the lead roles precisely to disrupt the still-heavily entrenched meta-narrative of cinema. The cast characters are, in general, not portrayed other than in supporting roles in the film industry of the Western world, not to mention their being representative of some of the most vulnerable populations in 21st century life.

Q: What made you choose the poetic experimental sub-genre for CREATION rather than the more popularly used exposition, even though it is a non-fiction film?
A: I have long been enamored by the raw effectiveness of music as a universal character in its own right in film, even in documentary, to both mirror and replace much of the dialog that makes a film comprehensible to an audience. If you consider many films of the silent era (e.g., Chaplin) and the oeuvres of Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Tarkovsky, you will notice a depth of meaning about them that is largely absent in today’s films with regard to the subtle skill of conveying essence and story with the least use of spoken language. A film is not “filmed theater,” as Bresson and Doyle emphasized. It is the poetic editing of both picture and music (with sound) in relation to time and space, not narrative exposition, that is most potent in creating and eliciting raw emotions for people at the gut level, because this process bypasses the conscious mind of viewers without attempting to crushingly do so by verbal direction or through what I can only describe as overwhelming ‘noise.’

Q: Can you talk about where you ended the film and what are the last thoughts you wanted people to come away with?
A: The end of CREATION comes with a comparatively long extreme close-up of the grandmother with a pleading expression on her face, followed by a medium shot of tall grass with a few interspersed corn sheaves. Grandfather clocks are ticking relentlessly in the background after a door has been slammed shut, while the earth rumbles with increasing intensity and frequency before dying away. Given the multiple layers of the film, I deliberately left the meaning of its ending open to the different interpretation of each viewer. However, I had a specific meaning in mind, which I shall not be disclosing so as not to spoil the audience’s viewing experience.