“I always struggled to belong to any land. Water makes me feel like I can belong. I recreated visually my embodied connection with water through oral testimony and a sensorial experience as an attempt to narrativize that connection.
Playing with form to experiment with a new embodied female subjectivity is an important component in my films. Here, I worked with a musician. This dialogue between sound and image creates a liminal space where protagonist, filmmaker and viewer meet. The split screen is also a way to give shape visually to my internal journey of traveling a position of in-betweenness.
Another ‘dispositif’ in my films is to use landscape as a character interacting with the protagonist. Here it is like a companion for that exploratory identity journey. The various forms and shapes of water helped me carve that journey visually.
The landscape intertwined with the voice-over evokes feelings of a place that is presently inaccessible due to the current tragic situation in Syria. I wanted to offer a space for the memories of that place to be embodied though the visual act.” M.REY
Myriam REY is a French/Syrian London based filmmaker. She started out making documentaries while studying anthropology at University College London and won the Inspiration award in 2015 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council Film Awards for her first short film “This Island’s mine”. In 2019, her short film “Only My Voice” funded by Creative England and BFI network won Best Short Doc at Nova Frontier FF in New-York. It screened at festivals including London Short FF, Aesthetica Short FF, Paris Arab FF, Encounters FF and Beirut Int FF. Myriam was part of the BFI Network & BAFTA crew 2018.
Director Statement
I am interested in using cinematic ‘dispositifs’ to experiment with new possibilities of embodied female subjectivities to tackle themes that are close to my heart such as memories and uprooted experiences as well as the search for reclaiming one’s own hybrid identity.