Meeting with Kitty Anderson

After my meeting with Kitty Anderson this Thursday, I got to thinking about ideas for some experimentation I can do before leaving for Cyprus to shoot my final project film. 

Due to the structure of my film being so reliant on shooting on location in Cyprus, I had questions for her about what I could be doing here in the next couple of months in terms of research, shooting, and experimentation. Kitty suggested that I could speak to any university societies that Cypriot people are heavily involved with, in order to ask them questions about their experiences with work and life in the UK, which could be compared and contrasted to the stories told to me by my grandmother and grandfather. After reflecting on our meeting, I decided that a good idea would be to gather a handful of Cypriot people who I am acquianted with and interview them about their thoughts and feelings regarding some of the concepts my film will be dealing with.

For instance, my film will be tackling the issue of language in Cyprus: how we are consistently impelled to speak the official language of Greece, instead of our own dialect of Cypriot. My main idea was to record conversations I plan on having with several people, where we are both speaking the Cypriot dialect - these need not be conversations with some kind of political motivation, but informal conversations one would have with friends. Another idea, which is more politically driven, would be to ask them specific questions about the Cypriot language:

• How did you learn to speak Cypriot?
• In which spaces do you feel that Cypriot is most embraced?
• What is your favourite Cypriot word?
• How has the Cypriot dialect changed since the generation of our grandparents?

I would also be interested in asking the participants to bring something to the conversation that reminds them of home. Ideally, I would prefer to shoot the conversation in extreme close-up, only showing certain aspects of their faces, or bodies, rather than the entire person, thus avoiding the footage looking like the standard interview set-up. I would want this to be more intimate and revealing of the person's mannerisms and therefore their identity.

I will continue using the blog as a way of tracking my process in planning these filmed conversations, which will take place between the couple months, as I want to incorporate these (or the information acquired from them) for either my second semester assignments or my final film.