Understanding Belonging: Bittersweet Uncertainty
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.
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.
