Portrait

2014, 15 minutes

The film explores a moment in the life of Sybil, a young emerging artist who finds her passion for her lover at odds with her passion for her work.

Portrait is a period short film inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Oval Portrait' and artist, poet and pre-Raphaelite model Elizabeth Siddal. The film explores a moment in the life of Sybil, a young emerging artist who finds her passion for her lover at odds with her passion for her work. This tension between her art and her lover - who is also an artist and for whom she is the ultimate muse - has tragic consequences for all. Portrait seeks to celebrate the talent and intelligence of female artists in the 19th and 20th centuries, who struggled for recognition in the male-dominated art world. In writing the film, writer/director Melissa-Kelly Franklin was inspired by women who found themselves embroiled in a creative melting pot - women like Lizzie Siddal, Annie Miller and Florence Carter-Wood. These women became almost as mythical as the heroines and idealised women they portrayed in paintings, becoming more recognised for their faces and bodies, rather than their individuality and creativity. This film seeks to peer behind the surface of the portrait, to see something more of the woman behind the face captured on the canvas.