Troubling dialogues: fitting words into place

This paper examines the screenwriting processes developed during the creation of a collaborative essay film. The strategy emerges through its authors’ shared production experience, allowing the intertwining of their subjectivities with political and social histories.

Using their practice research project, Father-land, as a case study, the authors critically reflect on their evolving dialogic methodology developed through collaboration.

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 Old Nicosia was close to the Green Line, the demilitarised buffer zone patrolled by the United Nations Peacekeeping Force, which separates the Turkish-occupied Northern half of the island from the Greek Cypriot South. Living and filming near the Green Line 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 for the authors 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.

Parker and Moore posit a screenwriting process in which their narration relies on being spoken and recorded in the locations in Cyprus where they had filmed over a year earlier – both to infuse the recordings of Father-land with appropriate ambience and to inflect the words with the integrity of being and speaking ‘in place’.