SILVIA
ESSER
CINEMATOGRAPHY
I WANNA BE BRAVEARENILLAS
AN EVEREST DEATH
SITUATION
SCOPE
PHOTO-SERIES
CUERPOS3
TALASO4
BRAVE5
musicvideo
2026
5 min
Online
2026
5 min
Online
Written by ||||||||||||||||||||
Mixed & Mastered by ||||||||||||||||||||
Video by Silvia Esser
shot on Sony Handycam 4K
I Wanna Be Brave is a title that speaks to me. It also speaks to the way I found myself filming women and their lives in China. Women I only see. Women I don't know. Women I never interact with, only admire. I step outside my own body, outside my own self, and take shelter in the gaze of others. I don't exist. I only look.
Being a voyeur somehow depersonalises you. The "I" begins to disappear. It becomes irrelevant. You become what you look at. Like a mirror, your own life starts to take the shape of whatever you choose to observe. You slip into other people's minds, into their thoughts. Are they running late? Are they wondering whether their flatmate remembered to put the washing on? Are they questioning whether they've chosen the right path in life?
All of those questions I ask myself about what other people might be thinking always come from my own consciousness, from what is familiar to me. No matter how little I know the person I'm looking at, I end up projecting my own way of thinking onto them, my own words, my own feelings into their body.
So maybe there is still an "I" after all. Not a physical one. Not an "I" that acts, but an "I" that projects.
In China, I was constantly driven by impulses. There was always more happening than my mind could process at once. So I picked up the camera. I channelled it. Everything no longer had to fit inside me, only the things I decided to point the camera at.
How do I hold onto it? When do I capture it? How do I hold onto all these unfilmable things that, even if I had filmed every single one of them, I would never use because I'd be too embarrassed to make something so private public?
Then I think: keep the feeling, Silvia. Keep the feeling.
That's the most important thing films can do for me. When a collection of impulses within an audiovisual work leaves you with such a specific feeling that you can revisit it as if it were a memory from your own life.
For me, the editing of I Wanna Be Brave had to feel like the memory of everything that happened during that journey. Not the events themselves, but the feeling they left in my body. The feeling of having lived so much that I no longer know how to hold onto it, how to remember it. I wanted to hold on to the feeling of being amazed like a child, exactly as I experienced it during that journey. Forever.
And I can't.
Sometimes I forget that I've even been to China. Not really forget, but I can no longer condense what it felt like to be there. I just list the cities I visited. Notes for future travellers.
I felt like an alien. Really, like an alien. As if I were the first woman to ever leave Earth and arrive somewhere else. I keep thinking that the first thing she would have had to do was find a way to explain to the people back home what she had seen for the very first time. What she had felt. What she had lived.
That astronaut was me in China.
I wanted to hold on to everything, just so I could make my grandmother understand.
How do you describe a city that feels larger than a country? A place where the horizon disappears, where you never see the same face twice? Some experiences seem to resist language from the very moment they happen.
How do I explain that?
I can't,
I can't.
I can't!