Maria Berns

The analog and digital places as story triggers

Axolotl Cinema

More and more, we remember through and with the help of the algorithms that different
digital systems and platforms use. This turns them not only into players but also into
producers of new memories. As memory is being reformulated by algorithms, are
digital technologies and informational perspectives influencing screenwriting and
expanding narrative possibilities?
How would we write scripts in the future?

Probably, this writing proposes interactions within a database following the
characteristic logic of cybernetic culture to create an open, multimodal, and
intermediate narrative that creates another kind of story. The screenplay would not
establish a single route but a range of possibilities.
It might be a construction that follows a network logic out of the schemes of beginning,
development, and resolution. Thus, everything can be a beginning, a development, and
a resolution at the same time.
Conceived as a neural network, the script can be an architecture of nodes in planes
and layers organized in levels that create provisional structures that produce different
films.

There are many points of entry. It is a script without resolution, and different possible
developments or plots coexist. It is to think of the script in terms of flows and
processes that follow unique narrative mechanisms and not fixed unities of action,
time, and space.

This paper will explore the possibilities that the dialogue between analog (which
includes the physical place where the writing takes place) and digital technologies
opens to us.

María Berns is a filmmaker and sociologist. She completed graduate studies in
Mexico and the United States in sociology, film and literary creation. Her films have
been screened at festivals in the United States and Europe. She was awarded the
prestigious Kodak Award for her film La Novia. In Tijuana, she produced and directed
spots for UNICEF and directed the first film workshop for children in Baja California.
She was a visiting filmmaker at the film school of Istanbul Bilgi University and at
Rochester Institute of Technology where she filmed Roma, Jamaica in Winter and Hielo
Negro. At the University of Texas at El Paso, he wrote the novel De Ciervos y
Mariposas which he adapted to film. She worked as a screenwriter for Channel 11 in
Mexico City and Telemundo. During 2008-2009 she worked as Coordinator of
Correspondents at NOTIMEX. With a grant from IVEC, she developed the screenplay
project Visit as Art in a neighborhood near the Port of Veracruz. There, with the support
of FONCA, she made the feature film So Long, which she wrote with the Estímulo a
Creadores Cinematográficos granted by IMCINE and has been exhibited at
international festivals and in multimedia formats at the Centro Cultural de España and
other cultural centers. She is the author and director of Axolotl Festival de Cine
Escaparates de la Ciudad de México, a festival conceived as a curatorial project and
an intermedia and transversal film project carried out in 2015 and 2016. As part of the
Axolotl Cinema platform, which she founded, in 2017 she carried out the expanded
screenwriting project Mutterland with the support of the Germany-Mexico Dual Year.
She has held screenwriting workshops in Mexico City with the support of PROCINE,
Veracruz, Tijuana, Argentina and in the United States. She is the author of the
transmedia screenwriting project Lo que sucede alrededor that she has been making
since 2019 with the support of PECDA-CDMX and Rule, Comunidad de Saberes and
the film project Quimera. She has been a speaker at several international congresses
and colloquia with themes that link migration and cinema through her expanded script
proposal, an intermediate format for the writing, production and exhibition of film
scripts.

She teaches screenwriting at CIBEF and is a scriptwriter for the Italian production
company Triality.