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(No) Home Movie at Film Fest Gent 2024

78 Days (Emilija Gašić, 2024)

EssayPart of Issue #21: Young Critics Workshop 2023 & 2024

Home movies seem to be having a moment, their place in the zeitgeist growing bigger. The Instagram algorithm feeds me filmmaking workshops for working with one’s family records and I feel like I’ve already seen enough shaky handheld footage of someone as a baby to last a lifetime. Shot on camcorders and preserved on VHS, the poor quality of these images lends them the authority of the past, the credibility of an archive. Perhaps a hangover from the introspection borne out of pandemic lockdowns, we cling to these artefacts in an attempt to extract meaning from them. I’m also guilty of filming my mother, shoving a smartphone in her face only for her to start lecturing me about Buddhism again (I frustratedly turn off the camera). Maybe this is why I’m simultaneously drawn to home-made images and repulsed by their use in filmmaking, desperate to see how the film will reconcile the tension in making public the private scenes of family life, the packaging of its thorny intricacies into a smooth, consumable product.

A fictional archive might be the answer to overcoming my ethical ponderings: just use actors instead of your real family members! Inspired by director Emilija Gašić’s own home videos, the film 78 Days (which won the Explore Award at Film Fest Gent) is made up of staged Hi8 footage of three sisters filming each other during the NATO bombings of Serbia in 1999. As a result, it’s made to look like a real home movie from that time. I feel deeply uncomfortable watching the film after reading this on the festival website. My heightened awareness of its artifice makes me cringe every time the actors tell each other to stop filming and put their hand over the camera. With meticulous attention to detail, Gašić carefully cast actors for their regional accents who could believably pass for sisters, a process that took over a year. There seems to be an unresolvable tension between the spontaneity and amateurism you’d expect from a home movie and the casted and scripted pretence of 78 Days. Why is the film trying to emulate a home movie so realistically, and more importantly, what does it achieve by doing that?

Fictional archives in film have mostly stemmed from a lack. In Cheryl Dunye’s 1996 film The Watermelon Woman, the protagonist fakes archival photos of a black lesbian actress from early Hollywood because there are none in the official archives that depict her as someone with agency. An alternative archive is a way of creating history from absences. By embracing the fictive, a fake home movie can explore the mundane gaps in between the typical scenes captured of birthdays and weddings, to keep rolling where a real home movie would cut. The sisters of 78 Days bicker and furtively film each other getting told off by their mother, hiding behind walls and lying that the camera is off. It’s unclear if the actors playing the sisters are always holding the Hi8 camera or not. Nonetheless, the impression that they are gives an embodied subjectivity to the camera that offers a fascinating insight into the siblings’ dynamics. Silliness and petty fighting are ever-present, the camera not a silent witness but an active participant that is constantly acknowledged; one that is mocked, scolded, and talks back.

78 Days (Emilija Gašić, 2024)

78 Days’ micro-historical perspective of the NATO bombings, seen through the eyes of children, gives voice to marginalised subjects whose viewpoints are not usually part of any official narrative or national archive. The bombing occurs mainly off-screen, but we hear it boom dangerously close to the family home. Military violence haunts the mundane images of the girls lounging around. With school called off because of the war, they entertain themselves with made-up games to fill the anxious ennui of having nothing to do except wait for something to happen.  “A film can recreate, not the true historical event, but at least another version of it,” writes theorist Laura Marks in The Skin of the Film. Both fictionalising and projecting these intimate scenes on the big screen offer collective pathways of identification to those who lived through the period, helping Serbian viewers recollect traces of private memories they may have forgotten, in a way that official records like news clips cannot.

78 Days (Emilija Gašić, 2024)

Despite appreciating the merits of this film, I feel deceived by its aesthetics. The shaky and grainy amateurism is synonymous with factual accuracy, indicative of a real insight into a real family. The Hi8 footage stamped with 4 4 1999 promises an authentic look back 25 years into the past but instead operates as an uncanny simulation. In an interview, Gašić said that she wanted to “confuse” the audience, “to make them think these are actual tapes and you are travelling back in time”. She has certainly excelled in her intentions; I would have fully believed the film’s conceit had I not read the synopsis beforehand. I kept waiting for a reveal, for the camera to pan to the crew or some other mode of self-reflexivity that never came. Like the shock value of found footage horror when The Blair Witch Project was released, 78 Days relies heavily on the novelty of its concept—a family found footage movie—more concerned with sowing confusion than with critically examining the past.

What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov? (Faraz Fesharaki, 2024)

In her seminal essay In Defence of the Poor Image, Hito Steyerl writes that the ‘poor image’ can only be digital, compressed into smaller file sizes through online circulation and deteriorating in quality through contact between internet users. In another film shown at Film Fest Gent, Faraz Fesharaki’s What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov?, the poor image takes the form of webcam footage of the director’s conversations with his parents over Skype. The image glitches and lags, mouths move out of sync with the words coming out of them, warped by the bad Wi-Fi connection. In this case, I’m comforted by its apparent honesty, surely there can’t be any artistic intent behind his dad sitting halfway outside the frame.

Tapping into his personal archives of ten years of Skype conversations, Fesharaki condenses hundreds, if not thousands, of calls into a lithe 80 minutes. His parents talk about the weather, argue about women’s place in the home, and discuss their roles in the Iranian revolution, all the while in a constant state of digital distortion. It’s impossible to know how much time has passed between each clip, or whether they are even arranged in chronological order, creating a fragmented sense of temporality. Blurred faces and pixelation magnify the disjunctive relationship between audio and visual, past and present.

Time is fractured in both 78 Days and What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov?. There is no linear narrative, only splintered moments that are often unconnected, providing gaps that we can fill in with our own memories and imagination. However, the two take diametrically opposed approaches to the home movie; the former tries to restage the home video from scratch as realistically as possible while the latter works with existing footage that was not intended to be a film. Fesharaki says that he initially attempted to make a film with his parents by recreating his memories but gave up after a year. Upon revisiting his Skype footage, he began to ask himself: “why restage scenes when they already exist?”

His approach to editing is playful, with lyrical interludes of Farsi poetry and tar music. In part two of the film ‘Of Love and Hope’, he composes a video letter to his mother, showing her the places in Berlin where he fell deeply in love: close-ups of leaves in a forest, a bench in an empty park. The expansiveness of this act allows Fesharaki to give his mother an incomplete but honest look into his life for the ten years he’s lived away from home. She replies with her own video letter, telling him about the dried up river near their home in Isfahan, Iran through shots of people walking and biking through what once flowed with water. By abandoning the realistic recreation approach, Fesharaki can then experiment with new ways of connecting with his parents. In light of this, my biggest problem with 78 Days is its singular focus on authentic recreation to become an accurate time capsule of 1999 Serbia. Instead of acknowledging and playing with its artifice, it strives only to convince us of its realness. If authenticity doesn’t exist and we can never fully bring back the past, then doesn’t that mean we can free ourselves from the shackles of realism, to not only bear witness to history but to excavate it in new ways?

What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov? (Faraz Fesharaki, 2024)

Maybe I’m drawn to home movie films because they have no big overarching story, only the ambiguity of life in its elliptical incompleteness. When I sit down to edit the videos I took of my mother, I find no big revelation about our relationship, no neat conclusions to draw. Her idiosyncrasies, her nagging and jokes are all preserved on my phone, gestures and anecdotes taking up gigabytes of storage.

If cinema represents the privileged mode of spectatorship, it seems fitting that I watched both these low-resolution films via screeners on my laptop. No matter how stringently platforms like Festival Scope or Vimeo try to protect their films, uploading them to the internet in the first place means they’ll inevitably proliferate throughout the web. As the analogue is digitised, mediums melt into mp4 files and become subject to illegal sharing and piracy, eventually ending up on a private tracker with servers in Poland, for example. The family archive thus becomes part of a wider community archive, watched and maintained by random cinephiles all over the world. The beauty of the poor image is that it belongs to everyone and to no one in particular. We can let go of our haunting footage and allow it to be absorbed into the void of the net. If I ever finish the film about my mother, I’ll put it on a torrenting site instead.