This Haunting Memory That Is Not My Own
Fall Grants 2018 - Production Stage
Panos Aprahamian / Short Experimental or Essay / Lebanon, Germany, Qatar / 2019 / 20 min / Original Language: Armenian / Interests: Social Issues, Exile, Experimental
Synopsis
A family finds itself violently ripped apart from their native home and thrown into the sea, in search of a better future. A forest is raised to the ground to make way for industrialised agriculture. Images of a barren desert arrive from a lost future. A city seen from the sky expands, absorbing everything in its path. An unnamed narrator reads a letter addressed to an unborn descendant. Decaying melodies of Levantine music echo and self-destruct within a thick layer of ambient drone. As all these voices, sounds and images merge, they form a narrative that tells a universal story of land grab and land loss, exile, genocide and environmental destruction. ‘This Haunting Memory That Is Not My Own’ is an aural and visual essay that overlays several journeys, a sensory one that attempts to evoke a perceived time, place or geography through the mapping of territories, and a narrative one materialized as a speculative epistolary correspondence between the present and the future that continuously summons the past.
Credits
- Director
- Panos Aprahamian
- Screenwriter
- Panos Aprahamian
- Producer
- Moritz Maiworm
- Production Company
- Cosmo Pictures Limited
About the Director
Panos Aprahamian is a Beirut-based filmmaker and artist who works across different media to explore the various ways in which the past and the future haunt the present. Aprahamian holds an MA in Documentary Film from University of the Arts London (2015), where he studied as a Caspian Arts fellow, and a BFA in Moving Image from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (2008). He has participated in different film festivals and residencies around the world, including Ashkal Alwan's Home Workspace Program (2017/18).