NIFFF Invasion – They say I’m Cured Now

Other event

For the 2025 edition of NIFFF, CAN is giving carte blanche to artist Maria Guţă. Her work draws on the æsthetics of cinema and pop culture to explore the unsettling power of images on identity and emotions, as well as how these are mediated in contemporary life.

They say I’m Cured Now is a series of 13 postcards, each printed in 100 copies and distributed discreetly during the festival. Each card is a collage combining images from films and visuals created from scratch by the artist. She frequently uses her own face to embody or confront cinematic archetypes in a subtle act of exorcism.

The project draws inspiration from films depicting women in distress—perceived as hysterical, crazy, or disturbing—and questions how Hollywood has often distorted or stereotyped female suffering, reducing complex emotions to clichés or æsthetic gestures. Subtitles taken from existing films are superimposed on images from other sources, creating hybrids that are both made-up and strangely familiar. Each collage has been assembled intuitively, bringing together elements from different narratives and timelines. While using recognizable tropes, the work also attempts to observe them with a fresh eye, allowing something unexpected to emerge.

Echoing the NIFFF’s fascination with the fantastic and the strange, and resonating with this year’s retrospective theme—Take Care—the project offers a quiet reflection on the links between care, beauty, and control in cinematic representations of women.

CAN team:

Martin Jakob, Sylvie Linder, Nicolas Raufaste, Liza Trottet, Sebastian Verdon