Title: Mdree-Bahree Land of the Sea
Made by: Miriam Haile
Year: 2015
A short film that looks into a young African nation: Eritrea´s archive history, before and after its independence in ´91, by using new media and Eri tv, the state channel, as an entry level. What does it mean to build up a new nation, a country’s identity using moving images and sound? What is activated when one connect people, memories, experiences of the past, using moving images as a language? How does it tell or even re-create a new identity or even construct a national history? Looking into the meaning of an “independent state” with moving images. What does a state channel mean for its future history, its people and what kind of political structure may moving images hold? Is there also a danger in using such form of “representation” linked to new media? The film seeks to investigate what kind of mechanisms would be used by countries with different political situation, such as many young East African nations today, by living in so called post colonial times, many of their national archives are produced and still owned by the West. The film Mdree-Bahree Land of the Sea, revisits diffrent field recordings made in Eritrea before it´s independence (91´), with double screening windows and a subtitled phonecall recording, in the back of the images, the film breaks with it´s narration. The viewer finds them selves shifting perspectives, between watching the images and being watched by the images. By using moving imagery and sound as tools, the film seek to instigate an alternative and interdisciplinary dialogue on how to read/interpret or revisit different archives by focusing on how the moving images produce meaning and also how to deconstruct history. With its memories, political landscape, cartographies, the film hopes to play a critical role in the work of examining how one understands archival imagery and possibly also a historical recovery by using archives as a medium.
A special thanks to Mehary Tesfagiorgis (voice) & Eri tv (footage).
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