Miza

One of the earliest surviving photographs in existence, ‘The Set Table’ by N. Niépce, is one of the central inspirations for the film. I was fascinated by how much a family dining table, an immobile object, can reveal about the life that surrounds it. The immobility of the subject coincided with the seeming immobility of ‘covid’ times. While dealing with all of the uncertainty of the socio-political moment, I found myself fixed at home with loved ones and experienced days that went nowhere. However, it was precisely through this motionless gaze and fixed subject that I began to discover more and more life coming through. Our table became a peculiar stethoscope, listening intently for the pulse of this small beautiful everyday life - this time including all of its twists, turns and variations. Trying to adhere to my vision to be strictly observational, and following the chronology of the seasons as an ‘objective’ order, I soon found myself floating, slowly discovering that time is perhaps ever only intimate and subjective - an interior affair. With this came a feeling as if I were an alchemist working with the repetitiveness of days, of the gaze and of the gesture in order to be able to observe what it is all about; what could be the essence of, or the extract from, these days, this so-called life? And then the sunflower, with its giant golden yellow head, stares back at me, silently.