Father-land: Narratives of Memory in a Place of Conflict

The chapter shares critical insights into and reflective analysis of the screenwriting process for the author’s essay film Father-land (2018), made collaboratively with the sound artist and film-maker Stuart Moore through an artists’ research residency in Nicosia, the only divided capital city in Europe. During the residency, the film-makers lived close to the demilitarized Buffer Zone – a physical border controlled by the United Nations, which has separated the Greek Cypriot south from the Turkish-occupied north since the violent conflict that tore the island in two in 1974. Their day-to-day experience of this fractured urban landscape, inflected by their childhood memories as ‘Forces children’, whose fathers served with the Royal Air Force in Cyprus during the Cold War, prompted the evolution of ‘speaking in place’, an innovative method of creating the film’s narration through recording unrehearsed dialogue in the politically charged locations of the Buffer Zone several months after filming.