Useful Media Texts

 1. Children of Shatila (Dir. Jean Khalil Chamoun, 1998)

A clip from the Palestinian film, Children of Shatila. In this scene, young Palestinian children located in a refugee camp in Lebanon, interview an elderly man about his personal experience as a displaced person, the Palestinian revolution, as well as future prospects regarding the liberation of Palestine. The children use a digital camcorder to film and interview the man, as he sits by the front door of his home. 

In Palestinian, as well as in Cypriot culture, it is commonplace to ask your elders questions about the history of your country. Undergoind conflict, war, and displacement, as the Palestinians did, Cypriots obtain a lot of their historical information on personal experiences or stories passed down intergenerationally. My film, which will centre around the daily lives and past experiences of the elders in my life (my grandmother and grandfather) will also utilise this mode of filmmaking, as I plan on having conversations with my grandparents about their experiences as Cypriot people in order to learn more about how they perform their identity subconsciously, and how conflict has perhaps affected they ways in which the live their lives.

The use of digital camcorder footage is also something I will be utilising, as it brings a sense of immediacy and urgency to filmmaking. It also creates the impression of making archives in the present, due to its instantaneous, yet outdated, technology. The low quality and graininess of camcorder footage mimicks the found footage style and achieves a sense of authenticity that is less realisable with higher quality footage filmed on professional cameras or mobile phones.

2. News From Home (Dir. Chantal Akerman, 1977)

Chantal Akerman's 1977 structuralist film captures a neorealist perspective of 1970s New York through the eyes of Akerman as a young Belgian immigrant. The film is not driven by any narrative other than authentic scenes of New York underlaid by Akerman reading the letters that her mother mailed her from Belgium. The camera is predominantly still whilst allowing things and people in front of it to unfold and act organically, with almost no interference by the filmmaker. I plan on borrowing some of Akerman's observational techniques in order to explore the natural performance of Cypriot identity from my two characters. However, I will also combine observational filmmaking with relational filmmaking, occasionally communicating with my characters from behind the camera in a conversational style, rather than an official interview one. In the same vein as Akerman, I would like to capture a distinct and realist snapshot of Cyprus during a specific period of time. Moreover, I have been similarly applying voiceover as a narrative, contextual, and poetic device throughout my experimentation in order to explore diasporic identity and the feeling of yearning to be back home (i.e., in my 3rd portfolio segment 'the production of nostalgia through archives and voiceover narration').

3. Untitled (Dir. Michael Nicholas, 2020)

Untitled by Michael Nicholas is a short skate film made in 2020. It captures human connections and friendships made through the sport of street skateboarding, through the lens of neorealism, as people are filmed predominantly using observational filmmaking techniques. I am interested in the way music overlays images, and how it often infuses them with different meaning. I have already practiced this in my title sequence experimentation video by using the Greek song 'Cloudy Sunday' (Synnefiasmeni Kyriaki) as a soundtrack. Furthermore, Nicholas' use of stylistic shots that still maintain a high degree of naturalism and observationalism, is also an aspect I will be applying to my work.