The film explores cyclical motifs of arrival and departure through the artist’s grandmother’s migration to the United Kingdom and her posthumous return to Jamaica, creating a transcendental frame where memory and time merge. In this speculative space, the film navigates beyond the confines of mortality, reimagining a future where inherited stories resist linearity.
Through deliberate pacing, monochromatic cinematography, and an austere percussive soundscape, the film challenges conventional structures of time within moving image, using light as both thematic agent and formal device. The incorporation of internet footage of the grandmother’s funeral, streamed live on Zoom, adds a profound layer to its interrogation of time and presence within the moving image. In this digital translation, time unravels; the live-streamed moment is both an immediate event and a digital archive, accessible yet fleeting. This blending of temporalities—where an ancestral ritual is experienced through contemporary screens—draws attention to technology's role in reshaping traditional customs and memories, situating the work within contemporary explorations of the virtual and immaterial archive. Through this interplay, the film’s visual language moves beyond static representations of life and death, presenting a layered temporality where past, present, and digital echoes coexist, questioning how diasporic identities navigate temporal and spatial divides in an increasingly mediated world.
The work also interrogates the resilience of Black familial structures as they contend with diasporic existence, mediated through footage of the grandmother’s burial. Mourners in suits mingle with masqueraded figures in homage to Jamaican spiritual practices and Junkanoo iconography, crafting a visual dialogue on life, death, and ancestral presence. These cultural markers engage with Black Atlantic discourse, presenting the archive as a dynamic, lived repository of collective memory.