by Jonathan Ali
Through dialogues and monologues, signs and gestures, the seven films in shorts programme How Do We Communicate, How ponder the power and politics of language.
Robin Riad’s process-driven Abgad Hawaz is presented as an instructional film on learning how to pronounce the Arabic alphabet. Through an interplay of symbol, sound and technology, expectation is subverted in this work of playful and provocative opacity.
Language learning is threaded through Niyaz Saghari‘s intimate home-movie travelogue The Walnut of Knowledge, in which the filmmaker visits her homeland of Iran from the UK with her young son, Jonah. As Saghari teaches Jonah her native Farsi tongue and he discovers his mother’s family history, she engages her elderly father in conversations about a past time of war, a past now tragically present. In the garden an almost century-old walnut tree retains family memory, acting as a symbol of resistance and resilience, and rootedness between spaces, identities and languages.
Norms concerning language and communication are destabilised in Klarissa Webster’s Each to their own World, in which three deaf people engage in a conversation about growing up with spoken English and navigating the biases they frequently encounter. Punctuated by everyday examples of how society is constructed to centre the hearing experience, the film considers the possibilities for a world in which the deaf community is better accommodated, even as it affirms deafness in its own right.
In Alex Schuurbiers’s Placeholder, image and text interplay in a layered investigation into the language of film and narrative linearity. Process-led manipulation and transformation of analogue footage guides an attempt at reckoning with loss and remembrance in this subtly shaded, emotionally resonant work.
Shot in Galloway, where filmmaker Eilidh Morley grew up, the atmospheric, process-led DEÒ centres rootedness in the rural landscape and the Gaelic language in an eco-feminist reclaiming of the Celtic folkloric myth of the spirit known as the Bean Nighe.
Centred around a performance by the filmmaker, Lewis Tekkam’s I AMOK playfully explores the range of possibilities of non-verbal communication based upon a word pun. And in the sound-and-image interplay of the playful and punning A Mountain of Content, Duncan Cowles engages in much conceptual pranking via the verbal indexing of a series of images filmed in the Austrian alps. Are you content, or are you content?
