Project Description
This body of work emerges as a continuation of a deeply personal journey—rooted in my experience with breast cancer and the emotional terrain it has revealed. I explore layers of memory, grief, and healing, tracing the generational threads shared with the women in my family—my mother, my grandmother, and my maternal cousin.
My work begins in the body—as a site of transformation, grief, and resilience. Through video and analogue collage, I bring together fragments of family footage, personal phone videos, photographs, and collective journal pages. The work unfolds as an atemporal dialogue—between past and present, between women across generations, between image and memory.
During this process, journaling acts as a foundation for introspection. The act of walking and a continuous pull toward rivers, mountains, and forests—spaces where healing quietly takes place—form part of my embodied practice. These landscapes are not passive settings, but responsive presences: witnesses to grief, carriers of memory, and places where healing begins to root itself.
Artist Statement
CHEMO DAYS is a short non-narrative video shot during my chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer. I filmed long single-shot takes daily, for the duration of the four three-week cycles of treatment, as a ritual of finding stillness. The resulting video serves as a quiet reflection on fear and isolation, on ego surrendering to wonder and interconnectedness with my surroundings. The water, trees and the city become part of the fabric of the film and of my experience, filling the negative space around my treatment.
April Ibinceanu is a filmmaker and visual artist. She works primarily with video, documenting place and the built environment. Her experience with breast cancer has impacted her work, pushing her to pursue personal projects, exploring themes of home and childhood, illness and death, resilience and adaptation. After graduating from the Film and TV Production course at Westminster University in 2015, she continued to work in the film industry as Production Designer for film as well as with immersive installation and analogue film, having her work showcased both in the UK and at film festivals abroad. Over the years she has been teaching filmmaking to children of all ages. Having grown up in London, April is now based between London and her place of birth in Jiu Valley, Romania.
@april.ib
www.aprilibinceanu.com