by april forrest lin 林森
From racial segregation to wartime displacement, the four films in shorts programme Time Folds In consider the complexities of returning.
In Same Water, Martine Granby revisits the former site of Paradise Park, which as a ‘colored-only’ park in Florida during the Jim Crow era, was one of the few recreational spaces accessible to African-American people at the time. In close proximity lay Silver Springs, a white-only water park deploying exotifying language around purity, the jungle, and servitude as key to its marketed allure. Stitching together footage from her childhood visit with her grandparents, archive footage, and interviews with attendees and former employees of Paradise Park, Granby weaves a rich tapestry detailing this chapter of racial segregation, still within living memory, and its textured aftermath.
Greta Alfaro’s Gods, Fatherlands and Kings examines the haunting traces of war in the form of a choreographic exercise between music, camera, landscape, and performance. Triggered by the playing of a warped military anthem on vinyl, the camera pans right, the digital image continuously pivoting through its central axis as both literal and metaphorical flow onward. As the film’s unnamed Spanish village setting empties, its brick walls collapsing, men are drafted for war and disappear. Debris accumulates in the land as the occasional body, somewhere between a ghost and a memory, moves through the space.
In Until We Return, Huss Al-Chokhdar contemplates the notion of home through a diasporic concoction of family archive footage, performance and spoken word. VHS footage of a sixth birthday celebration in Cairo catalyses a dialogue with the filmmaker’s past self and inner child, sitting with the tensions between yearning and absence, self-protection and presence, while resisting the reductive allure of closure. Created from the perspective of queer exile, the film balances a negotation between the grief of lost connections and a commitment to return – incanting into being a place that is ceaselessly morphed through the act of remembering, and that is simultaneously lamented and honoured.
Imagine me like a country of love, by Thana Faroq, is a poetic exploration that approaches mark-making with chalk against the affective and material experience of returning to a homeland marked by war. Upon the filmmaker’s homecoming to Yemen, family photographs are rediscovered and new memories made amongst meals and music, alongside the traces of prolonged conflict permeate the land. Straddling Arabic and English, the film forefronts remembering through a layered collage of personal archive material, performance, and animation: an exercise that is necessarily fragile, yet which enables open-ended possibilities in its embrace of echoes, grief, and contradictions.
