by April Lin 林森
In Home Movies, eight films find poetry and richness in the concept of home – its textures, its memories, its shadows and joy.
In Atmospheric Arrivals, Ayo Tsalithaba searches in the space between clarity and abstraction for notions of home and selfhood. Proceeding through a constantly renewing narrative, the film finds meaning in plural temporalities, geographies, forms. In The Cyan Garden, Peng Zuqiang takes us to Changsha, China, to visit the B&B where his friend works. Containing the layers that are both hidden and tangible in a place, this resort unfurls into a vector of history, having previously housed a communist Malaysian radio station in exile.
The unhurried dance between light, shadow and repetition makes up a home in Maybelle Peters’s In Holding Pattern. As we observe a shadowplay leaving its mark on domestic surfaces, our own gazes join the habituated currents invigorating this domicile. The rediscovery of a box of the artist’s old home videos opens up a dialogue around the processing and reprocessing of images in Myriam Rey’s absent landscapes. The textures of video, of memory, and of home become akin to a spell that unlocks invisible histories, absorbed by and through the body.
In A Throwing Forth by Xiao Zhang, windows become openings to light as well as gateways between memories. Deftly blurring the line between inside and outside, self and other, the film effectively dwells in the transitory nature of remembering. Asako Ujita’s Fade is a portrait of her grandmother’s daily life in rural Japan, documenting the rituals, routines, and habits that go into making and maintaining a home. Simple moments such as sweeping the footpath or the dripping of a leaky tap are collated into a tender and deliberate observation of caring domesticity.
Anna Kipervaser’s Бабушка Галя и Дедушка Аркадий / Grandma Galya and Grandpa Arkadiy continues the intimate intergenerational lens by embracing the candid silliness present within close-knit relations. Morphing into a study of pattern and repetition, the playful, the absurd, and the devoting intermingle in an unspoken celebration of familial love. I am the space where I am by Ann Vance considers the blur between home and self, taking time to sit with how these are mutually constitutive – and to locate where experience and environment meet.
