A Conversation Starter for ETA
by Dương (Ari) NguyễnA Conversation Starter for ETA
My parents, who lived through the Vietnam War, are obsessed with America. By age 10, I was familiar with the idea that some day, I will move there—the logistics were murky but the dream, certain. I grew up with my future prospects for a life glued to the other side of the globe.
I am now here, down the well-rehearsed path, and I wonder what could have diverted this inevitability. Had it not been for the War, would they still have hoped for America for me? Would their dream still carry the shape of the empire?
The dreams presented in the Estimated Time Arrival film program were shaped by dissensus of desires. In the filmmakers of this series, I found constant negotiations of diasporic dreams - dreams that generally belong to collectives, at times at the expense of the individual. Struggling to reconcile between their home-lands and current ‘else-where’, these artists find a space to create, to render their insights in film. Their images point to absences, fragmentation, and double binds of past-present, the familial other—self, amongst other dimensions.
~ distances ~
The letter format of Mother's Letter presupposes both distance and simultaneity, “to” and “from” colliding through the combination of a mother’s self-narration and a daughter’s images. Beyond the format, one catches hints of her mother’s sense of distance in lines like: "I have made Berlin my home, there is no question about it. Here is the house where I live. I don’t have a house in Japan". Her words emphasize the physical base for belonging, yet also alluding to a severance of ties, revealing a sense of self containment. Her sense of home is her own to have and to build.
Similarly, Journey Inside A City conveys distance through first-personal narration. The warm and somewhat fuzzy voicemail sound heightens Munaf's breath, creating both intimacy, and also increased awareness of her situation's urgency. The thoughtfulness of her voicemails evokes a long-distance connection, where updates of daily life uphold the normalcy denied to her by her circumstance. Journey Inside a City tells an unfolding story of migration, capturing a moment of hectic transition. The film's different storylines command instantaneous switches of attention from Munaf's social media, to the message bubbles and cityscapes. Journey Inside A City's trajectory is disorienting, bouncing back and forth between different scales of existence. World events blanket Munaf's life, hefty and uncaring, while Munaf's individual life as an artist in Baghdad slowly disintegrates under their pressures.
In My Therapist Said, I Am Full of Sadness, we are first introduced to Tedja as an adult in their bathroom in Berlin, putting on hair gel. We hear them talk to their friends, half in Indonesian, half in English: "... and then I realized that I'm so far away from them. I live in Berlin. I have so many people that care about me." Their words are firm, the fact of distance etched into their self-narrative, its sentimental weight fully felt. Tedja's film also contains a climactic moment of discordance, where one could almost feel familial connection’s brittleness under distance's strenuosity. With Douglas R. Ewart and Gardika Gigih's Dance/Tarian playing non-diegetically, we hear Tedja recount to their friends an incident with their parents. Their father sent an article about a pro-LGBTQ+ church burning, and they consequently isolated themselves, despite their mother's efforts at reconciliation. Their father never apologizes, and their friends gasp at his nonchalance. Crisp and sharp piano notes swell, precariously stitched together by a flute melody floating in and out of key. We once again are viewing old home-videos. These images no longer assume the wholeness of childhood nostalgia. They seem fragile, like crystallized droplets that implode under force. Tedja's worlds are spun together for a moment: them, their friends and chosen Berlin family, their birth family, their upbringing. What seems far in the past reveals itself to be close to the heart, and strangers become better shelters than one’s familial dearest.
The natural code-switching captured in Tedja's film resonates with a moment in Dog Star Descending: "Great-grandma Melek always cried in the evenings in Greek". A similar moment of yearning for closure happens towards the end: "Indeed, I had to immigrate to Germany to understand my father’s mourning of his brother. I experienced on my own body the suffering my uncle felt." Safoğlu stretches the boundaries of the self to a kind of interpersonal collective body that is intrinsically familial. The home lives inside one's body and is activated through one's tears. The home lays in the weight of suffering as different family members pass a common geographic point. The characters in Safoğlu's film, including himself, seem to have body doubles elsewhere, co-existing in different points of a timeline, and on earth. The experience of home is corporealized in the body.
~lineages~
My Therapist Said, I Am Full of Sadness begins and ends with footage of young Tedja playing in the pool with their relatives. The tapes glow with conviviality. Another home-video introduced their parents, posing as the “best couple”—picture-perfect, idyllic heteronormativity. Then, Tedja on a swing, camera-shy, a faint sheepish smile, lovingly proclaimed by the filming relative as "a young child with an old soul”. The description is a lighthearted counterpart to much heftier questions of identity later presented in the film. The snug, wholesome home-videos set the scene for Tedja's later footage during their visit. Though different in tone, Tedja's family tapes provide a sense of continuity for Tedja's maturation. The fact that these tapes were included in their visual quest to reconcile their parent-child relationship denotes an understanding that childhood is still an essential and connected part in their growth.
In Mother's Letter, I'm most struck by the montage of Schedelbauer and her mother’s photos match-cut through multiple points in time. It is something akin to a detangling of an emotional knot, when a daughter may see her mother's image in herself, and all there is to inherit from her lineage down to the simplest features. Tracing the corners of Schedelbauer and her mother's eyes, or the contours of their lips, I was left speechless by the poetry of resemblance. The two women were both set on their own paths, harbouring their own ambitions, actualizing themselves through their personal trials and tribulations. Yet they were also shaped by the close parallel they held with each other, an invisible string of likeness.
Dog Star Descending's manipulation of personal media feels like a reclamation of agency, while also bringing a kind of daring immediacy to his storytelling. Photos of Safoğlu and family are stretched, cropped, shredded, rearranged, laid by worn shoes, muddy laces, soap bubbles, cigarette butts... These elements are revealed slowly on a scanner bed, moving along like a conveyor belt. Contrasting with Safoğlu's prose, which was riveting and emotionally charged, the conveyor belt seems matter-of-fact, a scientific inquiry into the multitude of histories that intersected throughout his life. Just as the machinic scanner bed is adorned with artifacts of Safoğlu's life, he punctuates a colonizer's history of domination and displacement with curious, at times painful, facts of his family, their hopes, and his own rebellion and self-discovery.
The Instagram timeline in Journey Inside A City breaks up the relentless passing of time. Amidst all that is going on (with the world, in the film), the photos Munaf posts herself are the most defiant assertion of her personhood, living a full life with art and company. We encounter banal and cruel threats that flatten this self-perception, for instance, when she speaks of her visa issues: "They call us "people without a country," which I can accept so long as they give me papers." The perspective gained from her use of dashboard cam is one of self-command, as the space ahead opened itself up entirely, coming into full view. Constantly in motion, Munaf conveys transience, but also an inquisitive sense of peace and mundanity that overlays much more drastic geopolitical movements, as well as personal movements.
~dreams~
I want to return to dreaming. These films, by no means, deny any reality, but insist on their own subjective worlds. These worlds carry hues of hope, fear, obsessions, grief, nostalgia, yearning - diasporic perplexities. These dreams may manifest individually, but they are also understood generationally, albeit in different and possibly conflicting shades. It is in
these dreams that one may reconfigure one's reality, and transform a situation, a state, a fate into a home of one's own.
In My Therapist Said, I Am Full of Sadness, we are led down Monica Tedja’s dream-world through interlocking hand shadows. In these images of exquisite tenderness, Tedja and their partner's hands fluttered like butterflies, reaching for one another. The shadows mimic a chase in the dream narrated, where they must find Charmine before their parents find them at the airport. The space between lovers feels almost surreal, like they were holding a portal into their own dream-world. At the repetition of the dream, the audience is invited, visually, into the portal - and here we arrive, at the airport. The Jakarta airport appears impossibly liminal. Airports are a place to feel liminal, weightless, transient, only anchored by awaited welcomes and goodbyes. The persistence of the airport image captures perfectly a mind-body split, between past and contemporary belonging, and the process of navigating along split terrains.
I am awestruck by the anecdote in Dog Star Descending: "She told us at the start of our preparatory classes that we would soon be dreaming in German." And indeed Safoğlu did. As these different dreams—of slumber, or aspirations—gathered so closely, the unconscious meets wishful thinking for a generation's future. This convergence was interpretably made in critique of a colonial education, instilling the learner's position of inferiority and dependency by alluding to a complete transformation of their mind. I think about how dreams can be generational, can take generations to materialize, and can belong to generations beyond one's own—such are Safoğlu's German dreams. And it will be naïve to assume that all these dreams are perfectly desirable. Some of Safoğlu's most heart-wrenching writing in the film comes in the form of, "I’m thankful to my parents for taking it upon themselves to send me to that school. I can now better distinguish between feelings of guilt and gratitude."
Mother's Letter questions the reciprocity of maternal dreams. There seem to be two opposing flows: Schedelbauer's mother's own dream as a young woman, and the dream she had for her daughter. One was well-documented in her home-videos. The other, meant for Schedelbauer, was verbally relayed: sometimes subtly, sometimes straightforwardly as pieces of advice. In return, the filmmaker captures her mother as if in a dream world herself: she walks towards the camera in increments, like someone blinking her into existence. She almost disappears into the snow that surrounds them, or behind the branches. This visual poem parallels her mother's home-videos, but decisively through the daughter's distant viewpoint. It is as though visually experiencing the state of missing someone from afar, in all its complexities.
In Journey Inside A City, Munaf's joy manifests in the multiple documentations of a previous life - of her and Sada, on her Instagram. The virtual space feels like a distinct truth, separate from the string of bad news that she received. Here, I'm reminded by her description of corpses' smells in the smoke, or the panic in her voice at escalating political turmoils. Her personal, virtual space holds the testaments to her happiness, to what is dear, and comprehensible, hopeful, to her.
The paths these films have taken instilled in me a sense of immense gratitude, as if I am accessing a collective reservoir of shared diasporic feelings. We may not be dreaming of the same homes, yet we dream in unison. Sarah Munaf, Aykan Safoğlu, Sylvia Schedelbauer, and Monica Tedja offer us a glimpse into their own home-making, films of the homes-not-yet-settled-into. They document their processes of turning the strange into familiar, and estranging the familiar for truth. I would like to think, too, that they relive and repair the dreams bestowed upon them, from time to time.
I am now here, down the well-rehearsed path, and I wonder what could have diverted this inevitability. Had it not been for the War, would they still have hoped for America for me? Would their dream still carry the shape of the empire?
The dreams presented in the Estimated Time Arrival film program were shaped by dissensus of desires. In the filmmakers of this series, I found constant negotiations of diasporic dreams - dreams that generally belong to collectives, at times at the expense of the individual. Struggling to reconcile between their home-lands and current ‘else-where’, these artists find a space to create, to render their insights in film. Their images point to absences, fragmentation, and double binds of past-present, the familial other—self, amongst other dimensions.
~ distances ~
The letter format of Mother's Letter presupposes both distance and simultaneity, “to” and “from” colliding through the combination of a mother’s self-narration and a daughter’s images. Beyond the format, one catches hints of her mother’s sense of distance in lines like: "I have made Berlin my home, there is no question about it. Here is the house where I live. I don’t have a house in Japan". Her words emphasize the physical base for belonging, yet also alluding to a severance of ties, revealing a sense of self containment. Her sense of home is her own to have and to build.
Similarly, Journey Inside A City conveys distance through first-personal narration. The warm and somewhat fuzzy voicemail sound heightens Munaf's breath, creating both intimacy, and also increased awareness of her situation's urgency. The thoughtfulness of her voicemails evokes a long-distance connection, where updates of daily life uphold the normalcy denied to her by her circumstance. Journey Inside a City tells an unfolding story of migration, capturing a moment of hectic transition. The film's different storylines command instantaneous switches of attention from Munaf's social media, to the message bubbles and cityscapes. Journey Inside A City's trajectory is disorienting, bouncing back and forth between different scales of existence. World events blanket Munaf's life, hefty and uncaring, while Munaf's individual life as an artist in Baghdad slowly disintegrates under their pressures.
In My Therapist Said, I Am Full of Sadness, we are first introduced to Tedja as an adult in their bathroom in Berlin, putting on hair gel. We hear them talk to their friends, half in Indonesian, half in English: "... and then I realized that I'm so far away from them. I live in Berlin. I have so many people that care about me." Their words are firm, the fact of distance etched into their self-narrative, its sentimental weight fully felt. Tedja's film also contains a climactic moment of discordance, where one could almost feel familial connection’s brittleness under distance's strenuosity. With Douglas R. Ewart and Gardika Gigih's Dance/Tarian playing non-diegetically, we hear Tedja recount to their friends an incident with their parents. Their father sent an article about a pro-LGBTQ+ church burning, and they consequently isolated themselves, despite their mother's efforts at reconciliation. Their father never apologizes, and their friends gasp at his nonchalance. Crisp and sharp piano notes swell, precariously stitched together by a flute melody floating in and out of key. We once again are viewing old home-videos. These images no longer assume the wholeness of childhood nostalgia. They seem fragile, like crystallized droplets that implode under force. Tedja's worlds are spun together for a moment: them, their friends and chosen Berlin family, their birth family, their upbringing. What seems far in the past reveals itself to be close to the heart, and strangers become better shelters than one’s familial dearest.
The natural code-switching captured in Tedja's film resonates with a moment in Dog Star Descending: "Great-grandma Melek always cried in the evenings in Greek". A similar moment of yearning for closure happens towards the end: "Indeed, I had to immigrate to Germany to understand my father’s mourning of his brother. I experienced on my own body the suffering my uncle felt." Safoğlu stretches the boundaries of the self to a kind of interpersonal collective body that is intrinsically familial. The home lives inside one's body and is activated through one's tears. The home lays in the weight of suffering as different family members pass a common geographic point. The characters in Safoğlu's film, including himself, seem to have body doubles elsewhere, co-existing in different points of a timeline, and on earth. The experience of home is corporealized in the body.
~lineages~
My Therapist Said, I Am Full of Sadness begins and ends with footage of young Tedja playing in the pool with their relatives. The tapes glow with conviviality. Another home-video introduced their parents, posing as the “best couple”—picture-perfect, idyllic heteronormativity. Then, Tedja on a swing, camera-shy, a faint sheepish smile, lovingly proclaimed by the filming relative as "a young child with an old soul”. The description is a lighthearted counterpart to much heftier questions of identity later presented in the film. The snug, wholesome home-videos set the scene for Tedja's later footage during their visit. Though different in tone, Tedja's family tapes provide a sense of continuity for Tedja's maturation. The fact that these tapes were included in their visual quest to reconcile their parent-child relationship denotes an understanding that childhood is still an essential and connected part in their growth.
In Mother's Letter, I'm most struck by the montage of Schedelbauer and her mother’s photos match-cut through multiple points in time. It is something akin to a detangling of an emotional knot, when a daughter may see her mother's image in herself, and all there is to inherit from her lineage down to the simplest features. Tracing the corners of Schedelbauer and her mother's eyes, or the contours of their lips, I was left speechless by the poetry of resemblance. The two women were both set on their own paths, harbouring their own ambitions, actualizing themselves through their personal trials and tribulations. Yet they were also shaped by the close parallel they held with each other, an invisible string of likeness.
Dog Star Descending's manipulation of personal media feels like a reclamation of agency, while also bringing a kind of daring immediacy to his storytelling. Photos of Safoğlu and family are stretched, cropped, shredded, rearranged, laid by worn shoes, muddy laces, soap bubbles, cigarette butts... These elements are revealed slowly on a scanner bed, moving along like a conveyor belt. Contrasting with Safoğlu's prose, which was riveting and emotionally charged, the conveyor belt seems matter-of-fact, a scientific inquiry into the multitude of histories that intersected throughout his life. Just as the machinic scanner bed is adorned with artifacts of Safoğlu's life, he punctuates a colonizer's history of domination and displacement with curious, at times painful, facts of his family, their hopes, and his own rebellion and self-discovery.
The Instagram timeline in Journey Inside A City breaks up the relentless passing of time. Amidst all that is going on (with the world, in the film), the photos Munaf posts herself are the most defiant assertion of her personhood, living a full life with art and company. We encounter banal and cruel threats that flatten this self-perception, for instance, when she speaks of her visa issues: "They call us "people without a country," which I can accept so long as they give me papers." The perspective gained from her use of dashboard cam is one of self-command, as the space ahead opened itself up entirely, coming into full view. Constantly in motion, Munaf conveys transience, but also an inquisitive sense of peace and mundanity that overlays much more drastic geopolitical movements, as well as personal movements.
~dreams~
I want to return to dreaming. These films, by no means, deny any reality, but insist on their own subjective worlds. These worlds carry hues of hope, fear, obsessions, grief, nostalgia, yearning - diasporic perplexities. These dreams may manifest individually, but they are also understood generationally, albeit in different and possibly conflicting shades. It is in
these dreams that one may reconfigure one's reality, and transform a situation, a state, a fate into a home of one's own.
In My Therapist Said, I Am Full of Sadness, we are led down Monica Tedja’s dream-world through interlocking hand shadows. In these images of exquisite tenderness, Tedja and their partner's hands fluttered like butterflies, reaching for one another. The shadows mimic a chase in the dream narrated, where they must find Charmine before their parents find them at the airport. The space between lovers feels almost surreal, like they were holding a portal into their own dream-world. At the repetition of the dream, the audience is invited, visually, into the portal - and here we arrive, at the airport. The Jakarta airport appears impossibly liminal. Airports are a place to feel liminal, weightless, transient, only anchored by awaited welcomes and goodbyes. The persistence of the airport image captures perfectly a mind-body split, between past and contemporary belonging, and the process of navigating along split terrains.
I am awestruck by the anecdote in Dog Star Descending: "She told us at the start of our preparatory classes that we would soon be dreaming in German." And indeed Safoğlu did. As these different dreams—of slumber, or aspirations—gathered so closely, the unconscious meets wishful thinking for a generation's future. This convergence was interpretably made in critique of a colonial education, instilling the learner's position of inferiority and dependency by alluding to a complete transformation of their mind. I think about how dreams can be generational, can take generations to materialize, and can belong to generations beyond one's own—such are Safoğlu's German dreams. And it will be naïve to assume that all these dreams are perfectly desirable. Some of Safoğlu's most heart-wrenching writing in the film comes in the form of, "I’m thankful to my parents for taking it upon themselves to send me to that school. I can now better distinguish between feelings of guilt and gratitude."
Mother's Letter questions the reciprocity of maternal dreams. There seem to be two opposing flows: Schedelbauer's mother's own dream as a young woman, and the dream she had for her daughter. One was well-documented in her home-videos. The other, meant for Schedelbauer, was verbally relayed: sometimes subtly, sometimes straightforwardly as pieces of advice. In return, the filmmaker captures her mother as if in a dream world herself: she walks towards the camera in increments, like someone blinking her into existence. She almost disappears into the snow that surrounds them, or behind the branches. This visual poem parallels her mother's home-videos, but decisively through the daughter's distant viewpoint. It is as though visually experiencing the state of missing someone from afar, in all its complexities.
In Journey Inside A City, Munaf's joy manifests in the multiple documentations of a previous life - of her and Sada, on her Instagram. The virtual space feels like a distinct truth, separate from the string of bad news that she received. Here, I'm reminded by her description of corpses' smells in the smoke, or the panic in her voice at escalating political turmoils. Her personal, virtual space holds the testaments to her happiness, to what is dear, and comprehensible, hopeful, to her.
The paths these films have taken instilled in me a sense of immense gratitude, as if I am accessing a collective reservoir of shared diasporic feelings. We may not be dreaming of the same homes, yet we dream in unison. Sarah Munaf, Aykan Safoğlu, Sylvia Schedelbauer, and Monica Tedja offer us a glimpse into their own home-making, films of the homes-not-yet-settled-into. They document their processes of turning the strange into familiar, and estranging the familiar for truth. I would like to think, too, that they relive and repair the dreams bestowed upon them, from time to time.