Barbara's Game is a cross between a documentary, experimental, and artist's film that was created as part of a residency at La Guarimba Film Festival in Amantea, Italy

It is a film about a game of shadows that I devised on a beach near my family's apartment in Virginia when I was six, a time when I was struggling to adapt to life in the United States after our move two years earlier from Moscow, Russia. In the game, one player attempts to recreate a pose of another’s, which was traced in the sand. For me, the beach was one of the few neutral places where I felt free.

My mother documented my game for one of her graduate classes in 1995. I had not seen her project until I found a cassette labeled "Barbara's Game" at home in 2017. Playing it, I heard my mother’s voice narrating my game, mixed with the soundtrack of classical music, waves crashing, birds singing. I learned she had wanted to make a film. She “played” it with a slide projector. She wrote a screenplay, photographed and collaged the parts of the game, and recorded a “voice-over” mixed with music. In 2017, I "stepped” into the identity of my mother in 1995. I learned she wanted to make me a gift — to improve my low confidence in who I was — by participating so actively in my game and capturing my story. Her gift was not lost to time. 

This game has always been a mechanism in my identity. For this film, I went back to the beach with my sister to step into the same “poses” made in 1995. Themes of embodiment and tolerance permeate throughout. Identity, much like a shadow in the sand, morphs with light and time, and however one attempts to step into another’s shoes, the experience will never be the same. What matters in the end is the game — even if the line is shaky or the sun has hidden behind a cloud.