Sometimes it’s not until the project is finished that I begin to know what the project is about.
I’d been sifting through this footage: travel movies, home movies, fragments from projects that never became more than that. It was the summer of 2018 that I began assembling these parts, working intuitively, letting the process guide me and I began to realize that I’d made a Rorschach test for myself, a formalist self-portrait of my Belgian-Japanese-American-Jew heritage and a personal emotional journey following my mother’s passing, my father’s remarriage, and Emma having my child.
January 2019 while shooting in Hong Kong, I finished the video. It felt more like it finished itself amidst my conversations with Julian Ross, Tiffany Sia and Andrew Vaterlaus-Staby. Thoughts about T saying she’d come home to watch home die. Thinking about how a friend of my mother’s told me that I’d never feel at home in Japan or the United States, how that was sad but also true and reassuring.
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