Film short abstract:

Stories We Didn’t Tell follows post-Soviet Jews, Germans and Russians living in Berlin as they contemplate secondhand memories of the Second World War. Through voices of multiple storytellers, the film results in a polyphonic, sometimes parallel secondary witnessing of the Second World War.

Film long abstract:

Stories We Didn’t Tell follows post-Soviet Jewish, German and Russian Greta, Elena, Luba, Nastia, Natalia and Yury living in Berlin as they contemplate secondhand memories of the Second World War. To address what may have been ostensibly “unspeakable” for their grandparents’ generation, Stories We Didn’t Tell turns to grandchildren’s accounts, who belong to/position themselves within different post-Soviet sub-groups. They recall memories that have been transmitted across generations. The film thus recontextualises – through their recollections – concepts of “perpetrator”, “victim”, “victory” and “loss” – through the voices of multiple storytellers, resulting in a polyphonic, sometimes parallel secondary witnessing of the Second World War.

Film short abstract:

Using W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness as a framework, I examined the identity crises that migrants, particularly the Yorùbá diaspora in Peckham, South London, may experience, along with the strategies they use to navigate and resolve these challenges.

Film long abstract:

I am concerned about the identity crises that I assume migrants face and the various methods employed in resolving them. Using the Yorùbá diaspora in Peckham (a South London district within the London Borough of Southwark) as a study lens, I explored W.E.B Du Bois’ double-consciousness theory as a panacea and corrective lens to understanding the problems of a multicultural world.

During my fieldwork, the stories of second and third-generation Yorùbá British-Nigerians spoke of struggles and victories, losses and gains, letting go and moving on, and how London’s hybridized environment shaped their identities. In this third space, they found ways to hierarchise parts of their identities in moments or situations that demanded it, and these different parts were not in conflict. To my interlocutors, identity is seen as a performance. I was astounded.

My astonishment led me to find the principle of elasticity in the Yorùbá philosophy. A philosophy that I found serviceable enough to strive to develop an ethnography that focuses on Yorùbá consciousness – one that embraces the views of Yorùbáness as a creative process of becoming. As a consciousness, its plastic nature allows for opposition to Yorùbáness as a race rooted in a place. Culture is then seen as a consciousness that is simultaneously closed and open, allowing for additions and modifications.

My experience at Peckham instilled the notion that recreating home or finding oneself, although a herculean job, is possible and that the double consciousness lens is a serviceable heuristic in identity studies.

Film short abstract:

“The world is blue at its edges” reflects on the current political moment through an intimate letter to the narrator’s unborn child.

Film long abstract:

“What could I tell you about the world I live in? ” Addressing her unborn child, the narrator tries to find answers partly through claustrophobic pictures interwoven with intimate notes on a pregnancy in times of a pandemic. Based on a childhood memory, the experimental short film spans from the Cold War Iron Curtain, to the so-called “refugee crisis” and the renewed closing of borders during COVID-19. Textures of walls closing in, blur with pixelated maps, creating a subjective portrait of a new reality and its digital image-world. The world is blue at its edges is directed at an unknown future. It’s a film about life and everything that speaks against life. As if behind glass, fragments of perception appear. They confront the somber world of today, consisting of screens and lockdowns, with the faint heartbeat of an unborn child. In the film the mother shares her thoughts with the child. What can she show to her future offspring, which images of today can speak tomorrow? Between almost dystopic pixelated found footage of Youtube videos and familiarly unreal images of daily life in a world of surveillance with Covid a narration appears that is mainly concerned with inner and outer borders: the Wall, the Iron Curtain, police states, migration, fear. The narrator hesitates as she asks herself and her child if those borders will remain in us even after they have long disappeared.

Film short abstract:

The video is a personal attempt to resist to the propagandistic historical narratives and the monuments that identified with these narratives. It is a feminist gesture to resist to the violence and its celebratory symbols through a a scream.

Film long abstract:

The video is a personal attempt to resist to the propagandistic historical narratives and the monuments that identified with these narratives. It is a feminist gesture to resist to the violence and its celebratory symbols, such as a tank as a monument for commemoration. It is an artistic attempt to speak out about what is hard to put in words but accumulated in body. It is an attempt to break the ties with the narratives that enforced on me due to my mother tongue. When it is impossible to write or to create, and the art lost its meaning - i choose to scream.

The video is a momentary reaction on the events of August 2022, which took place in Estonia, in Narva, my home town. Since the war in Ukraine escalated, the removal of Soviet monuments in Estonia became intensively debated topic followed by the government’s decision to demolish any Soviet attributes and monuments from the public spaces. The tank monument in Narva became a stumbling block between the views of different communities within the country. It has especially became symbolic and problematic because it stood right at the border with Russia, on a riverbank of Narva river, facing Estonia. In the final scene I am standing on that riverbank facing Russia. As I grew up in Narva, I felt an urge to speak up about the situation with the monument and the brutal colonial war in Ukraine was a backdrop for it.