"Lost in Translation"
Section MS18, Ayanna Blair-Ford
Keywords: diaspora, language, pre-colonial, colonialism
"Lost in Translation" explores the erosion of cultural identity through the lens of language loss. Forced by globalisation and colonialism, indigenous languages face extinction, severing communities from their past and future. This personal piece grapples with this loss, drawing on the filmmaker's own experience of living far from their homeland.
Nostalgia guided the process at every step, in an attempt to find a familiar setting with familiar characters and a familiar sense of warmth. The piece centres around a local ballad, "Tuzo Mog" (Your Love), used as a metaphor for the love one shares with their cultural identity. The lyrics, almost poetic in nature, narrate these emotions while a conversation between the filmmaker and their grandmother plays in the background.
Challenging conventional Western filmmaking, "Lost in Translation" employs a cyclical structure, looping each time to mirror the emotional disorientation that accompanies the disconnect in the conversation. The film utilises archival footage, intentionally cropped and manipulated, to emphasise on the expressions that layer onto the emotions that one experiences as you view the piece. This abstract visual language, coupled with the distorted audio, aims to create an immersive and unsettling experience that leaves the viewer with a profound sense of unease and a poignant understanding of the fragility of cultural identity- a feeling akin to the discomfort of not being able to understand a language, a connection to one's past, and ultimately, oneself.