Planning my film

After my session with Callum Rice, I wanted to gather my thoughts about my project and come up with a structure that I was happy with, which brought together all the disparate but linked ideas I've had since the beginning of the course. Callum suggested that making a mindmap of all my ideas and trying to find connections between them could help me come up with a structure for my film.

Brainstorm mindmap

Though this helped lay out my ideas visually, it still didn't help me come up with a narrative structure for my final project. After this I decided to write more detailed notes based on my initial project aim/research question and try to unpack this verbally.

I wrote several similar research questions and also considered how this film ties into 'bigger picture' research questions about the impact of colonialism on other societies, or how post-colonial societies navigate identity after years of imperialism and neo-colonialism. Then, I asked the questions 'how has Cypriot identity changed in three generations?' and 'why has Cypriot identity changed in three generations?', going on to list the reasons why I believe so.

After this, I unpacked in more detail how Cyprus is an interesting case of a once-colonised country internalising a coloniser mindset, as is seen in the notes above. I delved into how current efforts to uber-modernise the country are antithetical, in both values and morals, to the native Cypriot community. This brought up two clear and simultaneous facets of Cyprus - the traditional, community-led Cypriotist identity and the part of Cyprus characterised by foreign investors, westernisation, and individualism. This led to the idea of making my film a commentary on this "new Cyprus" that is attractive to foreign investors and tourists, that natives rarely get to enjoy, a side of Cyprus whose construction relies on the disadvantagement of local communtiies. Here is my structure roughly outlined.

Narrative structure

This exercise helped me think about my project more clearly, as I felt the ideas were already there but I just had to gather them into a coherent strucutre. Presenting two antithetical and disputing aspects within Cypriot life, the latter which is emerging at the expense of local, mostly working-class communities, is an interesting way of exploring a dialogue between the two issues by involving elderly and young Cypriots voices in the research process and, hopefully, the film. The two divergent realities also give me the opportunity to explore more experimental visual techniques like the split screen, where two things can occur simultaneously within the frame.

Lastly, another connecting link to this structure was a dream I had recently of my late grandmother. The universal experience of losing a grandparent, and the feeling of longing to see them in the present to talk to them and ask them all sorts of questions could act as an allegory for the reality that a certain aspect of Cypriot life is at risk of being lost, to the modernisation and westernisation of Cyprus for political and monetary interests. I am planning on presenting this dream for my five minute excerpt, as this could act as an introduction for my film - I will be making a separate blog post about that later on. Below are some notes I took in relation to this dream and how it connects to my narrative structure.

Dream of Yiayia