Melodious Image Film is pleased to announce that award-winning filmmaker Nisha Platzer’s documentary feature debut ‘back home’ will screen at RIDM, the Montreal International Documentary Festival. The film has been invited as a selection in the New Visions Competition and will screen to in-person audiences on Sunday, November 20, and Wednesday, November 23, 2022.
back home follows Platzer’s pursuit to get to know her older brother, Josh, twenty years after he took his own life. Over a five-year period, she connects with the friends who knew him best as a teenager – his found family. Through intimate recollections re-imagined on 16mm and Super8 film, and lyrical, handmade visuals, back home floats between memory and present time in a fragmented meditation on identity, loss, and healing, exploring the transformative power of grieving in a community.
The film, which was selected for the Cannes Docs – Docs-in-Progress Canadian Showcase (supported by RIDM, Telefilm, and Hot Docs), had its World Premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival to sold-out audiences and was invited for an additional third screening. Much of the film’s journey takes place in Platzer’s hometown of Vancouver, but the seeds of this filmmaking journey began in Montreal, where she lived after attending university at Concordia and continued to grow, along with her education at the renowned EICTV film school in Cuba.
“Bringing this film to Montreal, where I spent many formative years, is a coming home of sorts,” says Platzer. “It was Montreal where I first fell in love with handmade and experimental film practices which are used throughout back home. The journey to healing and the process of making this film has brought me back to RIDM and to this city I adore. My wish with the film is that it goes beyond my story and calls upon the viewer to see their own experiences reflected within its layers.”
back home’s unique handmade quality recalls the photochemical processes Platzer found solace in after her brother’s death and uses abstract celluloid images to represent the changing chemistry of Josh’s brain as he suffered from clinical depression. The abstract sections are filmed on 16mm and Super8, then manually altered to create a beautiful and disturbing visual quality. The use of hand-processing techniques, such as solarization, contact printing, tinting, toning, scratching, and puncturing the film, results in a mixture of textures, colors, and light. In some sequences, plants and seaweed were used as a film developer, in others, the film was buried in the earth along with Josh’s ashes near the train tracks where he found refuge. Fittingly, these places – the ocean, the mountains, and the train tracks – are where Josh asked that his ashes be scattered.
The techniques and imagery throughout the film are placed rhythmically throughout the journey as a kind of sanctuary from trauma and offer moments for contemplation. Their use not only provides a strong and unique aesthetic for back home, but helps frame the documentary as a part of the same healing process that it describes, non-linear and tidal.
back home was written and directed by Nisha Platzer (Vaivén), co-written and edited by Jenn Strom (The Road Forward), produced by Joella Cabalu (On Falling), with cinematography by Suzanne Friesen (Be Still) and Flávio Rebouças (Pattaki), editing and additional cinematography by Milena Salazar (Highway to Heaven), music and sound design by Todd Macdonald – Norvaiza (Silver Pools) and executive produced by John Bolton (Doug and the Slugs and Me).
The film was produced with the participation of Telefilm Canada and the Talent Fund and made possible with the support of The Canada Council for the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, NFB Filmmaker Assistance Program and Cannes Docs Marché du Film. back home was filmed in Vancouver and Sooke, Canada on the traditional and unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-waututh), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), and T’Sou-ke Nations, and in Havana, Cuba.
Image: Nisha Platzer photo by Erika Lind
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