George Kouvaros

The work of homemaking in which the filmmaker is engaged is thus not only about the creation of a continuity between past and present. It is also about the future – how we remember the person that we will become.

For those of us lucky enough to grow old with our parents, we enter into a particular type of complicity. We do not want anything from them. We do not want them to change or to show us something they haven’t already shown. It’s too late for that. The only thing we want is perhaps the hardest thing of all for them to provide: an affirmation of their own happiness.

How can we tell the story of places where families with limited means came and went and made a living of sorts, places that act as meeting points between the old and the new, the long established and the newly arrived, where each generation is given the opportunity to understand itself as different from a previous generation and, hence, able to break away?

Hughes asks us to consider the return of the past as an auditory event, as something heard rather than witnessed. The difference is crucial.

Beginning with his mother’s creased identity card from the era when Cyprus was colonised by the British Kouvaros links the great themes of twentieth-century migration to the affective structures provided by both photography and cinema that give a purchase for those lost and uprooted individuals swept up in these global eddies. His relatively short and multi-faceted meditation provides an analytical scaffold as well as a moving response to his own question – what do we owe our ancestors and the dead?