chasing childhoods across SE asia

Dearest sensory ethnographers...

Finally, I sit down for a moment. It's been wonderful to follow your posts at various internet cafes across SE asia. I absolutely cannot wait to see the final films, as I'll miss out on seeing the footage and the editing process. But it sounds like you've all been on incredible journeys. Just thought I'd say hello and fill you in on what's been happening in my film world.

I went to Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia to complete filming for a film entitled 'Worlds' that myself and my partner have been working on for 3 years... The film involves returning to the places of our childhoods and filming them as they are today. The film is attempting to capture that devastating feeling of falling in love, and never being able to know the past of your lover, forever grasping at blurry images of the stories they tell you. We've been travelling across Southern Africa and SE asia filming landscapes that have changed so much in our lifetimes - two lives which have had utterly different trajectories through history, Jean having grown up as a person of colour under apartheid, and me having grown up the privileged daughter of a diplomat.

We returned to places where I spent much of my childhood, Indonesia in particular. It was haunting to return to the beach resorts which had been simply jungle when I was a child. In the interveneing 20 years, mile-long resorts were built and have become completely derelict. Now, Indonesian tourists still flock there at weekends, but staying in isolated rooms around which other rooms decay. It was incredible to stand on the beach I played on as a child, watching banana boats and jet-skis whizz past, in front of Krakatoa on the horizon. Jakarta, choking even when I lived there, is now an apocalyptic gothem city of mile after mile of skyscrapers and black, oil-slick rivers. We made a friend who worked as a Salsa teacher at the Ritz, and can only hope he's alright after the recent bombings.

Now I'm back in the UK editing another project, about mothers and daughters (of which you saw a hint in one of my pieces) which is completely draining, but going well. In September I will return to Cape Town to edit 'Worlds' with Jean. Editing is always excruciating, those camera jerks, the missed words and funny angles, but all these perceived errors aside, the 'moment' usually finds its way of shining through. Watching hours of footage in the last two weeks, I've realised it's when I stopped trying to control the situation that the most magic moments followed, yet I was focused enough to follow them.

As for 'Blindness', once I'm in South Africa again I'll be applying for money to make it with the national broadcaster - fingers crossed! Good luck to you all in the last stages of filming, and I hope I make it out to the US for the screenings!

lots of love,
Sarah