UPROOTEDNESS: FAMILY ARCHIVES AND PLACE

How do we access our family histories? How can we understand or recognise the landscapes in which our parents’ parents lived — landscapes which will sometimes have changed beyond recognition over the past decades? The following two films interrogate how we might inherit nostalgia for a particular place from the stories, diaries, and photographs shared with us by older generations. But how far can we trust these memories? Along the streets of London, a valley in Wales, and a river in China, Rebecca Jane Arthur’s and Dino Zhang’s films show us the ways in which complete understanding of our family’s pasts lie tantalisingly just out of reach.

Hit Him on the Head with a Hard Heavy Hammer

Rebecca Jan Arthur / 2024 / Belgium / 48:45

Hit Him on the Head with a Hard Heavy Hammer departs from the handwritten memoir of the filmmaker’s father and his experience of displacement during wartime. Referring to the notion Thomas Hardy termed ‘The Self-Unseeing’ in his eponymous 1901 poem, the film returns to childhood and the matters that harden us: upbringing, social status, education, labour, and familial bonds. The memoir weaves into the film as both a contemplation on mortality and an illustration of fading memory, reflecting on how we pen our pasts and how they can be re-told.

Upon That River

Dino Zhang / 2024 / China / 28:44

The film explores a piece of a family’s past from a hundred years ago. Through the narration of a photo album by one of the family members, a history of regional migration caused by social changes is revealed. From hallucination, the protagonist's nostalgia for old photos and a longing for the past merge into one.