Father-land: Troubling Dialogues in a Divided Island

This presentation critically reflects on the essay film Father-land, a practice research collaboration between the author and the sound artist and film-maker Stuart Moore, which investigates notions of home and (dis)placement in the divided island of Cyprus. Political and social histories, the legacies of colonialism, occupation, and the Cold War, resonate culturally and also biographically for the film-makers, as both had childhood links with Cyprus through fathers stationed there with the Royal Air Force before the island’s division in 1974, when the United Nations established a demilitarized buffer zone across Cyprus, known as the Green Line.On receiving the 2016 Plymouth-Nicosia Artist Residency Award for Father-land, Parker and Moore spent a month as guests of Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre (NiMAC), in the Republic of Cyprus. Their base in the Greek Cypriot section of the walled city of old Nicosia was close to the Green Line, which separates the Turkish-occupied Northern half of the island from the Greek Cypriot South today. Living and filming here became a quiet reflection on the uneasy stasis of an unresolved conflict, which tore the island in two over forty years ago. Their families played small parts in the island’s past and the challenge seemed to be situating their film’s narrative in a ‘buffer zone’ between a sensitive and contested history and a nomadic and placeless personal reflection.The film-makers’ dialogic screenwriting strategy draws on the French-American cinematographer and film-maker Babette Mangolte’s reflexive explorations of place and home, and allows them to embed digital technologies and methods within an evolutionary and experimental film-making process. This fluid and non-hierarchal approach enables movement beyond binary perspectives, embracing multiple positions and viewpoints, to create an innovative multi-layered poetic moving image artwork that allows the intertwining of subjectivities with political and social histories of this place.

Paper delivered in Panel 1c, the BAFTSS Essay Film Special Interest Group: 'Revolutions, Politics, History: The Power of the First Person Documentary'