Finding the beauty in the mundane through the lens of film-making.

This short film was inspired by my personal understanding of belonging, which is something I have been struggling with my entire life; the country where I am from, where my entire family is from, is somewhere I have never lived. I wanted to portray, how belonging is associated to people, places, and self-identification, and how it can be understood both subjectively and collectively. I asked friends and family to answer, in whatever way they found fit, the question: What does belonging mean to you?
I decided to use a digital camera from 2003 – Nikon Coolpix 2100 – to present a grainy aesthetic and represent how the term belonging is difficult to subjectively understand and represent in a clear way. The video quality, alongside the varied answers, depicts how belonging, despite being a single word, holds a multiplicity of immense, and often unclear, meanings and understandings. Being from a country but having grown up elsewhere can generate a lot of confusion regarding communal belonging. However, although it remains unclear to me what belonging truly signifies, this project led me to see that it is a concept that can be understood in a myriad of ways, both communally and subjectively, and that belongingness fluctuates and varies over time; This word represents immense confusion and comfort, which to me, generates a feeling of bittersweet uncertainty and love.
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Short-film developed, produced, and released in 2023.

“L’immagine non è solo un oggetto dell’indagine teorica ed estetica. Essa costituisce il trascendentale, l’ineludibile condizione genetica del pensiero dell’essere; l’immagine come ‘concetto assoluto’ e potente forza di configurazione dell’esperienza” Johann Gottlieb Fichte (Poletti 2021, Introduction).

Translation: “The image is not solely an object of theoretical and aesthetic investigation. It constitutes the transcendental, the unavoidable genetic condition of possibility of thought and being; the image as an 'absolute concept' and powerful force of configuration of the experience.”
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Through the adoption of fast-paced auditory and visual montage, this short-film – entitled “Montage of the NYC Being: Unity in Diversity. Between Activism, Commuting, and Tourism” – presents the dual realities of life in a mega-city: New York City. On the one hand is the reality of the majority, one which constitutes an ever-moving, but nonetheless dual, quotidian ritual; Both tourists and New York City residents regularly find themselves in continuous motion, stopping solely to wait for the public transport – the residents and tourists – and/or to admire the immense skyscrapers – the tourists –. On the other hand, despite quotidian life continuing, public activism for Palestine is ever-present in the city, as protests and civil disobedience are organized in mass on the weekly. The visual and auditory montage in the short-film depict these conflicting but intertwined realities, as inspired by Griffith’s term “Unity in Diversity” (Suhr and Willerslev 2012, 284). Consciously, the videos incorporated in the film portray tourists and activists/protest participants in two different manners; The tourists are presented as subjective objects which blend into the New York City streets and background, whereas the activists are portrayed as more objective subjects. This intentional portrayal aims to further the effects that montage has on the audience: editing and selected montage methods help present an intentional and subjective point of view, even when the video maker/camera recorder remains silent throughout. Through the use of audio-visual repetition, speed- and clip-duration alterations, and fast-paced editing between clips, the short-film aims to render the ‘invisible’ visible, as discussed by Suhr and Willerslev (2012, 284), and manifest quotidian realities alongside activism within New York City and altering consciousness of said realities (Kapferer 2013, 22).

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Short-film developed, produced, and released in 2024.