Synopsis

Nostos is the return home; nostalgia the pain caused by this return. Following the stories of migrants living in Northern Ireland, present and past, reality and imagination, get blended in a poetic participatory documentary. 

Behind Nostos scenes

Nostos is a poetic participatory documentary that aims at promoting solidarity and raising awareness of the migrant experiences in Northern Ireland and Europe. Migration and displacement are deeply rooted in human history, yet our societies are still resistant in welcoming the unknown, the new, the other, forgetting the shared, the common, the human. With this film, we would like to compose moments of shared humanness, aiming at reminding us the essence that makes us human, living among other humans.

Nostos is about the shared human experience of feeling nostalgic for past experiences and memories from childhood, following a participatory manner, what Jean Rouch called “shared anthropology” (Henley, 2020: 225). Working together with our participants who have migrated in Northern Ireland from foreign lands, we have created a documentary that does not only attempt to recreate the characters’ own memories, but possibly trigger the viewers’ own affective experience and make them think what nostalgia is to them.

The word nostos, meaning the return home (Bonifazi, 2009: 481), is a word used in Homer’s Odyssey, to describe Ulysses’ epic journey from Troy to Ithaca. Nostalgia, a 17th century word (Sedikides et al., 2008: 304), is derived by the words nostos and algos (meaning pain in Greek), therefore the pain caused by the return home. Nostos as a poetry practice, aimed at elevating the heroic personas and their ability of finding ways to survive the hardships that they encountered on their journey, serving as a metaphor for self-discovery and perseverance, emphasising the optimistic side of nostalgia, and as Sushytska (2015: 36) suggests this “longing help[s] us create new places and times”.    

Forced displacement in the cases of refugee and migrant experiences, intensifies the feelings of loss and grief related to nostalgia; the only way to return home is with one’s imagination. Moreover, in the reality of war and politics, imaginary notions such as borders and nations come into play. What do then migrants and refugees dream of when they think of home? Is it the country itself, the space it occupies, its history, its culture, or something more personal, more fundamentally human? Klopper (2016: 11) teaches us that “personal memory, political history and fantasy identifications have a way of leaking into one another in nostalgic remembrance”. Is it possible that through the suffering from this separation from past identities, new ones can be formed, ones that are able to challenge the past and the established? 

With Nostos, we are exploring these aspects of nostalgia in relation to migration, in an attempt to reshape our understanding of these abstract notions of borders and nations, using as main filmmaking ingredients the poetic and participatory modes.

Following Nichols’ (2010: 162) description of the characteristics of the poetic mode in documentary practice, in nostos we are using poetic cinematography and surreal re-enactments, composing “patterns that involve temporal rhythms and spatial juxtapositions”, in order to evoke the sense of displacement. The characters are protagonists in their own memories, mixing past and present, foreign lands and Northern Irish landscape. Through this spatiotemporal blending, elements of irony, and optimism for the future are introduced, following Nichols’ (2010: 143) suggestion that “fluid, fuzzy boundaries are testimony to growth and vitality”.

The arrow of time forces us to move forward and leave behind the past, but our brains are designed to store memories, giving us access to past experiences, and teaching us to reassess, accept, learn, and all over again plan, for the future. However, as important as the optimistic side of nostalgia is, its melancholic side is part of our human nature, and we cannot neglect it. Sharing our nostalgia with others, not only eases the pain, but it reinforces our social nature as humans. Participatory filmmaking practice aims at strengthening our bond as societies and prevents widening the gap, and I hope that through this collective process of mental and emotional reassessment as a production group, we were able to create “a work that is only about itself and the passion of creation”, and by feeling homesick together, to offer “a model of freedom from popular culture” (Marks, 2002: 199) and its confining ties to borders and nations.

Bibliography

Bonifazi, A. (2009) ‘Inquiring into Nostos and Its Cognates’, The American Journal of Philology, 130(4), pp. 481–

510.

Henley, P. (2020) ‘Jean Rouch: Sharing Anthropology’, in Ginsburg, F. et al. (eds) Beyond observation: A History of 

Authorship in Ethnographic Film. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, pp. 225–255.

Klopper, D. (2016) ‘Introduction: The Problem of Nostalgia’, English in Africa, 43(3), pp. 9–17.

Marks, L.U. (2002) ‘Ten Years of Dreams About Art’, in Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 193–215.

Nichols, B. (2010) ‘How Can We Differentiate among Documentaries?’, in Introduction to Documentary. 2nd edn. 

Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 142–171.

Sedikides, C. et al. (2008) ‘Nostalgia’, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17, pp. 304–307.

Sushytska, J. (2015) ‘Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia: A Journey to the Home That Never Was’, The Journal of Aesthetic 

Education, 49(1), pp. 36–43.