HIRAETH

FILM DIRECTOR

EDITOR

A live music and film performance co-commissioned by North Carolina Symphony and Princeton Symphony Orchestra.  Hiraeth premiered in Raleigh and Chapel Hill NC in September, 2015, and continues to be performed by orchestras in the US and abroad, most recently by the New Jersey Symphony to open their 2019/20 season.

Hiraeth: (noun) A homesickness for a home you cannot return to, or that never was.

My film that partners Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Hiraeth, composed in the wake of her father’s death, presents a dreamscape of her father’s hometown and youth. It gazes back into an imagined past, its imagery a collage of invented home movies—an idealized and amped-up version of dad’s old super-8s. Taking Sarah’s family members as subjects (including her own children and her fathers’ twin brother) I shot in Salisbury, North Carolina, her father’s hometown. The children play within a narrative that is always kept slightly outside of the film’s frame--we sense it beside us, but our perspective is oblique to it. Next to a story rather than within in it, we can drift within the poetry of tones, colors, and textures it exudes

In making the film, I noted how a memory from my own childhood would often center on details tangential to whatever event caused imprint, focusing instead perhaps on a scuffed kitchen floor, or the musk of wet bark, or sunlight trapped in a spiderweb hung with dew. The vivid myopia of early memories reflects the immediate and tactile way that children explore and experience their world, often through play. The camera had to move and fixate similarly to open a window to a fictional nostalgic past, selectively foregrounding some elements while leaving others obscured in luminous haze—simplifying what is complicated and burnishing the beautiful.

—Mark DeChiazza

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