Chilean-American artist Claudia Bitran was still fresh out of grad school when she embarked on her magnum opus-a shot-for-shot remake of James Cameron's classic 1997 film Titanic. Relative to the sisyphean task at hand, her total lack of filmmaking experience was practically incidental. "When you have an idea like that, that's so trapped, it explodes everywhere when you have the chance to do it," she said.
After spending a year waiting tables in New York City, Bitran's chance to finally pursue her Titanic remake came when she was accepted to a residency program at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. There, residency life offered her ample grounds to implement her outsized vision, which has only expanded since. Today, Bitran's film continues to doggedly take shape-most recently at Brooklyn's Pioneer Works, where Bitran was briefly a 2020 artist in residence before COVID-19 cut the program short; the residency is expected to resume in 2021.
