The word home has a special buzz for expats. Thomas Wolfe famously said you couldn’t return there. Yet when we do go back, we’re acutely conscious of how different we are in Paris... our sensibilities seem tuned to a foreign frequency. Going home for expats is often a bittersweet experience. For many anglo-parisians, vacations don’t mean getting away from it all, but going back to it all!
Two expatriate independent filmmakers, Heidi Draper and Michael Raeburn, who live on a barge in Paris, tackle the subject in a self-produced docu-drama shot with a DV camera.
The couple started filming two years ago during a car trip to Boston for Thanksgiving. Michael thinks such expeditions are futile since families never get on, but Heidi disagrees. As they drive they discuss the significance of relatives and friends in a rain-streaked vehicle on a dark afternoon. All the anticipation as well as the dread of family interaction are skillfully blended on screen. Poetic memories of childhood — in WASP Boston for Heidi, in British colonial Africa for Michael — constitute a moving portrait of two very different yet oddly similar upbringings.
According to Heidi, the impetus behind the whole adventure was “a desire to try and make something as a couple who live together, and in the business of film... A perilous and some might say fool-hardy ambition!”
“Home Sweet Home” is an shoestring-budget production, a genre which Hollywood and the pseudo-independent film world often seek to imitate... “The fact that we were to finance this project on our own” says Heidi, “put the emphasis on having efficient small technology, flexibility of time and minimal personnel. The ‘caméra stylo’ with its tiny one hour tapes, its attaché case portability, its capacity to shoot in available light — and, with our specially-built microphones attached to the camera body — made DV perfect for our low-cost enterprise.”
“The purpose of the film,” says Michael, “ is to take the childhood memories of a couple, the filmmakers, and to evoke them in the most poetic and dramatic way possible. The key to this æsthetic method is the blurring of memory which dulls or distorts our recollection of people, while transforming the inanimate places of the past into personalities with a presence as great if not greater than the people who inhabited them.”
“In the same way as memory tricks the mind,” continues Michael, “this movie seeks to reduce the people of the past to disembodied voices, while the objects and places become charged with the power of actors who convey a tale of joy and suffering. Because each member of the audience seeing this film has a part to play, as the child of parents or parent of children, its manner of reconstructing memory encourages the projection of personal memories into those being revealed on screen.”
Yet as the lens looks past the “voices of the past” it finds a positive message — that having a family or family of friends is an essential part of our identity in a world in which nationality and a sense of place have less meaning. “It’s a basic human need to have some kind of family but the connection doesn’t have to be decided by blood,” says Michael.
“We wanted to do a film about our divergent feelings on family,” Heidi explains. “Michael wanted to talk about the constant uprooting he had experienced between Africa and Europe. Over two years, as we shifted between Africa, Europe and the US on business, we thought up the scenes from our respective childhoods which could best portray our memories. Both of us wanted to break with conventional documentary form and find a style that would enable us to treat our subject poetically and dramatically.”
“Of course, we weren’t sure how far we could go in these revelations without causing offense to family members,” says Heidi. “We also feared that the act of digging up our past might unleash personal psychological traumas that we weren’t keen to deal with on a private... let alone public level.”
“Home Sweet Home,” Mar 7-21, Studio des Ursulines, 10 rue des Ursulines, 6e, RER Luxembourg, tel: 01 43 26 97 08
