PRODUCTION STATEMENT

“I believe in happy chances and accidents. As a young artist, I have spent my working life exploring issues around the human body - creating projects concerning genetics, gender selection, imbalance, fertility and the very mystery of life. I believe in chance and intuition to bring me from one project to the next.

During all my main projects from 2009, I thought I was working like a scientist or an anthropologist, with a certain distance from my subjects...until the subject took shape as a tumor in my right breast. It’s 2016, I’m preparing a series of exhibitions and working on a movie project about my Terracotta Daughters, started in 2013. My gynecologist, who I wasn’t supposed to see for another 6 months, calls me in to redo a routine test the lab had lost. That day, she randomly discovers a knot. At age 31 I’m very suddenly diagnosed with breast cancer. My world falls apart. My priorities should be reshaped but I don’t accept it - ART first! As I go through chemo, losing my hair and my energy, stressing over my unfinished Terracotta Daughters movie, my dear friend and scenarist Alastair Siddons tells me I look very bad, that the daughters can wait and I should focus on my health instead. My friend Darren Aronofsky advises me to document what I’m going through, saying: “you’re lucky, as an artist you can turn anything that you live into material.” At that same time, I start to realize each and every step of the illness resonates strangely with all my past projects.

With all my main friends I followed the serendipitous path to build that movie: Agnès Varda with whom I staged my braid cut to make it less painful (we didn’t plan at the time that’d be part of a feature, we shot for fun), Alastair Siddons who dug through the archives footages of my past projects and research videos, my executive producers and friends who supported the movie, my family who shot some of the treatments and the hair shaving... I came to realize that filming was not only creative, it was a way for me to be proactive of my own illness - by saying “action” to myself while going through the treatments. I also made it because I hope it can inspire women going through the same journey to be creative and proactive with their illness.”

Prune Nourry

SYNOPSIS

Serendipity began as a book, published on the occasion of Prune Nourry's solo show at the Guimet National Asian Art Museum in Paris in 2017. The French-born, New York-based artist has spent the majority of her artistic career creating work that deals with women's bodies and female fertility. A recent breast cancer diagnosis led Nourry to create Serendipity-now in the form of a stunning first-person documentary-which captures the subsequent evolution of her body, her work, her soul, and her mind. This impassioned, beautiful film embodies the artist's belief that everything is connected, coincidence is an illusion, and "the essentials to life really are health, love, and art.

DIRECTOR

Born in 1985 in Paris, Prune Nourry lives and works in New York. She is interested in the fields of science and anthropology, particularly bioethical questions relating to gender selection and the artificial evolution of humankind. She explores these issues with an artistic approach that combines sculpture, installations, performances and video. Over the last few years, the artist has gained recognition for her long-term projects, such as the Terracotta Daughters army, inspired by the Xi’an terracotta warriors. The piece travelled the world between 2013 and 2015, from Paris to China and taking in Zurich, New York and Mexico City. It was buried in a secret place in China and will be excavated in 2030 when, according to Chinese demographers, the male/female imbalance will have reached its peak.