we always wanted to move to the country (2022)

2:58

For this film I wanted to experiment with making visuals that connect to an experience I had soon after having to move in 1990, as well as the feelings surrounding that time. I split the film into 2 specific scenes. For the first scene my mom’s account has been layered, it references a kind of repetition of the story over the years, the loudness and the chaos of what that experience was like for me as a 10 year old. I asked her to remember things that were happy, maybe fond memories of that time, but like myself, there weren’t many good memories and the request became a way to process heavier memories.

The quote, “we always wanted to move to the country” references her and my father, did not include my sister and myself, and in a way this was a shock to hear as I personally never knew they (as a couple) wanted to move to the country or had dreamed of anything as a couple because they were rarely together in my childhood. Visually we see a desk in a field where a graveyard is in the distance and land where a school used to be, a school that I went to when we moved.

The desk represents one of the few memories I have during this time but it is depicted as a returning to that place. I think about how 10 year old me must have felt when seeing the graveyard next to the school when I was in recess. Adult me realizes that kids that bullied me might have their generations of ancestors buried there.

The second scene is referencing how I cannot share my mom’s memory because it is not mine, but I believe and can relate to the feeling of the history, my memory is painful in a way that could only be distorted because it so unclear, which is why the silence at the end is present, the visual of the smaller film stock taped to the larger acts as way to process some dense and broken memory with dense and broken image.