Poppy - Animated Documentary about Worldbuilding and the Shaping of Culture

Through a series of scriptwriting workshops the team organized conceptual ideas and themes into visual narratives that can be told through film.
The results of the workshop are:
- a first draft of voice over for the film
- a miro-board timeline where we mapped out the script of the film.
The film will bridge contemporary art and film world through a unique take on the theme of “representation”.

TEAM: Director and artist Sophia Gjerding, writer Hans Frederik Jacobsen, producer Martina Scarpelli and technical director Lars Hemmingsen.

SYNOPSIS: Poppy is a short experimental documentary about a Neolithic teenage girl, who was found by archaeologists next to a carefully stored poppy seed container, one of only ten such finds worldwide. The importance of poppies to early human existence remains poorly understood. Through the voice of the unknown teenager, the film unpacks how the past is retold through an interwoven web of fictions and scientific discoveries - and how this draws threads to the way contemporary society is conceived. As narrator, she tells the story of how she left her childhood love, life and tribe - while also telling the story of how she, as a representation, is an entanglement of what we imagine to know about the past.

The film is based on an excavation of a neolithic settlement in Lake Bracciano outside Rome. Here archeologists have found the bones of what appears to have been a young woman and the remains of what (to this date) is categorised as the oldest appearance of opium poppy capsules / poppy seeds. Through interviews with different archeologists, the film tries to tell a story about representation of a past that is prehistoric.

A short film 'POPPY' will be produced based on a series of workshops on scriptwriting. All conceptual ideas and themes were made into visual narratives, which led to the development of 'POPPY'