Madeleine Hatz, A Royal Vagabond, an experimental documentary about artist Madeleine Hatz is a filmic prose poem: a portrait built from juxtaposed images and recurring visual elements, dispensing with conventions of plot, narrative, and chronology. The film is structured by pendular rhythms: country and city life, vita contemplativa and vita activa, dream and waking life, professional and private life. Inner and outer worlds alternate: daily rituals, insights, dreams, and acts of painting all intermix and nourish one another. This alternating structure is precisely apropos for the film’s subject: Madeleine Hatz is one of few contemporary artists who practices in two radically different modes, as both a solitary studio artist and a socially engaged performance artist.A “royal vagabond”, Madeleine Hatz is at home everywhere and nowhere. The film intercuts scenes from Lund, Stockholm, a country dacha in Södermanland County, and Brooklyn, all places where the artist has lived and worked. Sometimes dressed in a tattered robe, she passes through varied landscapes with the authority and autonomy of a St Francis. The artist has a natural dignity that grounds her in any place or situation; a character trait that, the film’s title suggests, was shaped by her family’s aristocratic background, but which ultimately rests upon her fiercely independent spirit. This artist’s homeland is not any particular geographic place—but rather the intersecting terrain of reason and intuition, logic and dreams, where private and collective imagination has its source. In these borderlands the artist transcribes shared longings and undercurrents "Songs from the Underground,” to quote the title of her most recent exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm.