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"Think of New Jersey. Think of Man Ray and Jean Cocteau. Now think of Daina Krumins -- the state's homegrown surrealist filmmaker. Ms. Krumins, 55, who grew up and still lives in Westfield, makes movies that are part live action, part animation but all surreal. For example, she used time-lapse photography to film slime molds growing on Quaker Oaks, and filmed 10,000 ladybugs crawling around a miniature living room. She has filmed paint peeling. She has created shots of creatures that look like coffee pots with crab claws attached, marching across a floor, and of women in feathered hats walking on water." - Margo Nash, New York Times, Nov. 17, 2002

Independent filmmaker Daina Krumins has produced three remarkable and surrealistic films, Summer Light, Babobilicons and The Divine Miracle. These animated shorts are unusual, and impressive both in terms of their content and the technique used to produce them.

Summer Light was completed in December of 2001. It was started 17 years earlier as a 16mm film, with the intention of doing the effects the optical printing but this turned out to be impractical and in 2001 all the material was transferred to digital video. It was completed using Adobe After Effects for compositing the images, Adobe Premiere for the final edit, and Cool Edit for manipulating the sounds. Since December, 2001, it has won the Silver Award at the Big Muddy Film Festival and has been shown at the Athens International Film Festival, the Dallas Video Festival and the "Not Still Art" video festival.

Filmmaker’s Statement:

"My way of seeing the world, or of re-assembling it in my mind, is unconventional. My main preoccupation as an artist, and to some extent as a person, has always been based on texture. Texture is such a small consideration for most people, to say that my visual world-view is based on a relationship with textures is almost like saying that the most important thing about a piece of writing is the number of punctuation marks. It seems silly. And yet, I believe it as a valid a way of looking at the world as any other way. But I wonder why repetitions have so much meaning for me. One possibility that has occurred to me is that perhaps my mind is more primitive in some ways, and that my obsessions and fixations have something to do with evolution. How to explain? OK. If a bird flies between two blueberry bushes and one bush has lots of berries and one has only a few berries, how does it know where to go? The same with a monkey looking at banana trees, or perhaps even a billionaire considering his various bank accounts. "Summer Light" come from my texture-driven, non-neurotypical way of finding delight and meaning. It's not verbal meaning, All I say in words is that it does, in fact, have meaning. In a way, it is my world."

"Daina Krumins' Babobilicons is a truly surrealist work in terms of both its process and product. Krumins takes time to make her films. It took her nine years to create this remarkable animated short, yet her method is in line with the surrealist affinity for chance operation. She cultivated slime molds on Quaker five-minute oats in her basement, planted hundreds of phallic stinkhorn mushrooms, and put her mother behind the camera to film them growing. The results are sexual and bizarre. She combined ordinary objects -- wallsockets, candles, and peeling paint -- to get unnerving, dreamlike images. Porcelain fish jump through waves; mushroom erections rise and fall. Her Babobilicons -- robotlike characters that resemble coffee pots with lobster claws -- move through all this with mysterious determination. Anyone who order 10,000 ladybugs from a pest control company to film them crawling over a model drawing room definite possesses a sense of the surreal."