Mona Hatoum was born to Palestinian parents living in exile in Beirut. On a visit to London in 1975, she was prevented from returning to Lebanon due to the outbreak of civil war. One of her earliest works, Measures of Distance is an uncharacteristically autobiographical piece for which she “made a conscious decision to delve into the personal”. The video work is constructed from images of her mother in the shower of the family home in Beirut. The Arabic writing overlaying these images like a curtain or veil represents her mother’s letters from Beirut to the artist in London. The soundtrack consists of an animated conversation between Hatoum and her mother overlaid with Hatoum’s voice reading an English translation of the letters. For Hatoum, as much as the work portrays the emotional intimacy of the relationship between mother and daughter, “it also speaks of exile, displacement, disorientation and a tremendous sense of loss as a result of the separation caused by war.”

A woman remembers her past by faces she sees while travelling on the Underground in London. She begins to believe that these people, like her, have all taken part in the same event which took place in the family home in Pakistan. The story takes the form of a letter to her friend Fatima. A personal documentary around journeys, memories and watching, watching while journeying and remembering while watching — travelling through memories, places and events and documenting them into consciousness. The story is spoken in Urdu and although there are English subtitles, they do not always appear in conjunction with what is spoken, producing a layered, ephemeral, and fragmented experience. Alia Syed, born in Swansea to a Welsh mother and an Indian father, expresses the dislocation of the diasporic experience while questioning the role of language in structuring power relations between class, race and gender.

Shauna Beharry is a third-generation Canadian of Indian descent whose work focuses on the loss of language and of cultural reference that happens with displacement. Seeing Is Believing was her first work in a mechanically reproducible medium. The video expresses Beharry’s frustration over her inability to express in this medium, for, paradoxically, she is using video to show the limits of vision. It begins with Beharry’s camera searching a still photograph over and over. The photograph is of Beharry, wearing the sari. Her voice on the soundtrack is describing the anger and bafflement she felt when, after her mother died, she could not recognise her in photographs. Only when she put on her mother’s sari, Beharry says, did she feel that she had “climbed into her skin.” The feel of the fabric awakens for Beharry a flood of memories that were lost in the family’s movement from India to Europe to Canada. (Laura U. Marks)

The point of departure of From Mouth to Ear can be traced back to a question: a young filmmaker’s request to her father to use his biological mother’s surname. A question that led to a profound reflection on what it means to be unable to speak the language of your ancestors, and which words in that language might be of help to feel and name what for a long time seemed unspeakable. According to Zita Bamurange Van Bellingen, it felt like searching for a voice that is no longer fully there, for stories and a history that can no longer be passed on. During this process, she discovered that this feeling of loss is shared by many. In her own search for sounds, rhythms, and words, she found connection, and that connection found expression in a film. A film in which language is explored as a bridge between one place and another, but also between past and present, with an eye to the future.

Maman, originated from a filmmaker’s attempt to tell his mother’s story — her move from her hometown of Likasi to Brussels at the age of seven, her longing for the sunsets of her childhood, her decision not to speak for a year, and her dream of becoming a photographer. The film ultimately took the form of a letter from a son to his mother, built around her voice reading the letter for the first time. For Niko Wei, the film grew out of the realisation that he didn’t so much want to capture her story as her voice. And that the film would serve as the fulfilment of a longstanding dream: that of a photographer whose very first image would be a portrait of his mother, champ contre champ with the image of a sunset evoking the indescribable feeling of loss and distance.