GFF Perspective Home in Motion

Paragraph Section - 1

The home is an image returned to time and time again in cinema. Often representing safety, classic genres such as horror like to turn this idea upside down. Elsewhere, the home can be an extension of character, mirroring the emotions inside the head. The films in this selection, although all from different genres, engage with the home through a temporal lens. Static foundations are changed irreparably through time, inviting both viewer and character to constantly reevaluate what they once knew.

A farmhouse is at the centre of Mascha Shilinski’s Sound of Falling. Over the course of a century, four young girls from different generations call it their home. Though each girl is distinct from one another, all are strangely preoccupied with moments of death and feelings of monumental loss. Whether it’s in the stretches of the body mimicking a death pose or the curls of legs pulled up to invoke lost limbs, the lives and memories of each girl folds into the walls of the farmhouse, a static home holding on to generational trauma and letting it slip out in gaps of time.

Paragraph Section - 2

Themes of dislocation are central to Kalu Oji’s Pasa Faho. The arrival of Azubuike’s 12-year-old son returning to live with him after a period of absence heralds an onslaught of change as Azubuike faces eviction from his shoe shop and the town around him is speedily modernised. The meaning of ‘home’ shifts when ideological fractures emerge within Azubuike’s Igbo community, and the film interrogates ideas of assimilation and imagined prosperity while directly engaging with Australia’s ongoing colonial fixation on growth and expansion.

The strong and smothering sea holds many memories that threaten to spill into the depressed Cornish village that witnesses the return of the Rose of Nevada, a ship lost to the waters some 30 years before, in Mark Jenkin’s ghostly mystery. As if in search of lost time, the boat transports Nick and Liam to 1993, where their village, now full and lively, threatens to trap them in a home – and state of mind – they now struggle to recognise. Shot in 16mm film, Rose of Nevada is like a found object washed ashore with the layers of men and memories once lost at sea.

Kamal Aljafari’s documentary With Hasan in Gaza is a preservation of time, a film constructed from rediscovered footage on three miniDV tapes, shot when travelling through Gaza in 2001, when Aljafari returned to Gaza to search for his former prison mate. With local guide Hasan, the film captures their travels from the north to the south of Gaza, documenting daily life in a film both haunting and beautiful, an image of the past which is both a capsule of memory, and an urgent reflection on Gaza today.