Echoes of Displaced Memories

Deutschland, 2024
49′
Kurzfilm(e)
OT: Echoes of Displaced Memories

Three filmmakers return to childhood spaces that are no longer quite the same. [mehrspr.OmeU]

Between memory and migration, there lies a space - not empty, but filled with echoes. Three filmmakers return to childhood spaces that are no longer quite the same. Who can claim ownership over remembered places? The very act of remembering transforms them. These visual stories, crafted by students from lands we call India, Iran, and Chile, refuse the simple linearity of a documentary and fiction. Through autoethnography, they turn the anthropological gaze back upon itself, asking: Who is looking? Who is being looked at?

In returning to childhood spaces, these filmmakers perform an act of double vision - seeing with today's eyes what yesterday's eyes once saw differently. This is not mere nostalgia, but an interrogation of belonging itself.

The decolonization of memory requires more than just new stories - it demands new ways of storytelling. When they film these spaces, they create them anew, neither fully past nor present, neither entirely personal nor wholly collective, in the gap between what is shown and what cannot be shown. They remind us that every act of remembering is also an act of creation, and every return home is also a departure. This is anthropology that dares to speak in the first person while questioning what that "I" might mean. The camera becomes not just a recording device but a tool for excavating layers of identity sedimented by migration, displacement, and the complex geometries of belonging.

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2021 · Shubham Sharma · Punjabi and English with English subtitles · 23 min

A Family Portrait

An auto-ethnographic film that explores the sensory relationship between distance and memory and what role they play in an immigrant's experience of migration. After finding a family portrait on my phone one evening in Germany, I felt a longing for my hometown. I wanted to make a film about it. But how can you talk about your family portrait without talking about the reality they inhabit? They're the sum of the people and environment they come from. By using the archive footage from back home I wanted to take an audience on a journey leading to my home where that family portrait exists.

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Α Guide to Dance for Adult Children

Through the lens of VHS home movies, the film is an experimental journey that delves into childhood memories, highlighting dance not only as a tool of expression but also as a manifestation of existence. Playing around with imagination and fiction, it attempts to reclaim agency and power for seven-year-old Sadaf and her classmates.

2024 · Sadaf Biglari · Farsi with English subtitles · 14 min

Echoes of Displaced Memories

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