The Ascension of Ava Delaine

A woman's ascent through the major stages of her life in five visual, stylized, non-verbal vignettes, primarily shown through her apartment windows in a nod to the voyeurism and non-verbal vignette storytelling of "Rear Window" (1954). The technical choice to film in 5 min single-take drone shot takes inspiration from the technical bravura of cinema's iconic uninterrupted shots such as the tracking shot in "Wings" (1927), the illusion of a single take in "Rope" (1948), the almost four-minute continuous shot in "Le Boucher" (1970), and above all the single-take Steadicam filming of "Russian Ark" (2002). However, instead of going deeper into a restaurant, a village or a palace in a horizontal movement, The Ascension of Ava Delaine uses drone technology to tell the a story through vertical movement, following a woman's rise in life as it is externalized through her movement from street level through the five levels of an apartment building. —Shaula Evans