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. A few other notes: I’ve kept a dream journal since I was 12 and have lately been recording them as audio memos. I’m also something of a sleep talker so I chose to include the audio in the beginning to set the tone for my intuitive unconscious logic that follows. There’s one shot that isn’t mine but sent from a friend while she was working in Baghdad, a go-cart track in the green zone. There’s another shot of the Syrian/Israeli border in the Golan Heights. It’s a very popular place for tourists to have their picture taken. I was not happy to be there. There’s some super 8mm footage from the 2nd to last trip I took with my parents, with my mother. The footage from Japan is from before and after my mother’s death.
