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Jil Guyon’s Experimental Short Threshold Comes to NewCinema/Experiment+
Jil Guyon’s award-winning experimental short Threshold will be streaming on Whush as part of the NewCinema/Experiment+ showcase.
Made in the United States in 2025, the 6-minute, 18-second black-and-white film centres on an unnamed woman confined to the rooftop of a castle in southern Portugal. Moving between performance, experimental film and visual art, Thresholdexplores themes of survival, vulnerability, seduction and psychological confrontation.
The protagonist is conceived as a contemporary Scheherazade, using seduction and cunning as means of survival. Guyon deliberately blurs distinctions between past and present, reality and imagination, and danger and performance. The viewer is also placed in an ambiguous position: not simply observing events, but potentially becoming complicit through the act of watching.
The film's striking location came about somewhat unexpectedly. Guyon created Threshold while undertaking an artist residency in rural southern Portugal, where she had originally intended to shoot in a nearby marble quarry. After visiting Evoramonte Castle, however, she decided its rooftop would become the setting for the film.
For a month, Guyon was given access to the castle each afternoon and was able to film freely inside. The production coincided with a particularly difficult period in her personal life involving heartbreak, family upheaval and financial problems. She describes the rooftop as becoming “a kind of laboratory for catharsis,” where personal vulnerability could be transformed into performance.
Although editing began shortly afterwards, Guyon put the project aside for more than a year. She eventually returned to the material once she had gained greater distance from the circumstances in which it was filmed.
That relationship between personal experience and performance is characteristic of Guyon's wider artistic practice. An award-winning multidisciplinary artist, she works across visual art, live performance and moving image, often exploring the female psyche through nonlinear visual narratives, autobiography and carefully constructed movement.
“I consider art homeopathic — a healing poison,” Guyon says in her director's statement. Her intention is not to impose one interpretation on an audience, but to create work in which viewers can bring their own experiences and associations. With Threshold, she hopes the beauty of the imagery draws audiences into the protagonist's experience and creates the possibility of a moment of catharsis.
An Established Multidisciplinary Practice
Guyon's work has been presented internationally across theatres, cinemas, museums, galleries and concert halls, including Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, the Queens Museum, Museum of the Moving Image, La MaMa and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Her performance video Widow was selected by filmmaker Guy Maddin for the Toronto Urban Film Festival and screened across Toronto's mass-transit system. Her multimedia dance-theatre production At the Borders of Eternity, based on The Diary of Anne Frank, was presented at WUK Wien in Vienna and televised in Austria, while Desert Widow is held in the collections of the Centre National de la Danse and La Maison de la Danse de Lyon in France.
Guyon has also collaborated and performed with artists including Joan Jonas, Noemie Lafrance, Helga Davis and Amanda Palmer. A Lumiere Prize nominee and recipient of the Tarkovski Grant, she has received numerous awards for her experimental film work. She previously worked as Curatorial Associate at Neue Galerie New York and holds an MFA in painting and art history from Hunter College.
Festival Recognition
Threshold has already appeared across film festival, performance and gallery programmes internationally. Its selections include the Modern Black and White Film Festival in Buenos Aires, Performance Mix Festival at Abrons Arts Center in New York, and Latitudes at Centro de la Cultura Plurinacional and Museo de la Ciudad Altillo Beni in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.
The film was also named a semi-finalist at the 2026 Tokyo Women Film Festival and received an Honourable Mention at Pollen: Video Spells in Brooklyn.
Its arrival on NewCinema/Experiment+ gives audiences worldwide another opportunity to encounter Guyon's distinctive combination of performance and experimental filmmaking.
Beautifully photographed in black and white and rooted in both a specific location and an intensely personal period in the artist's life, Threshold is a concise example of how performance can be transformed through the camera. Rather than following a conventional narrative, the film uses movement, gesture, location and image to create its psychological atmosphere.
Threshold (United States, 2025), directed by Jil Guyon, runs 6 minutes 18 seconds and will stream worldwide on Whush as part of the NewCinema/Experiment+ showcase.
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