Five minutes to drown in memory, borders, and what flows between us.
Jonathan Stavleu explores, in a stream-of-consciousness video essay, the relationship people have with water and what happens when access to it is taken away. For this work, he examines anecdotal histories he has heard from Estonians, as well as stories from his own family history in the Netherlands, weaving them together into a journal-like narrative.
Editing
Seamless collage of found footage, phone clips, oil paintings.
Writing
Stream-of-consciousness narration that somehow holds together.
Director
Jonathan Stavleu
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Stavleu's choice to shoot new footage on smartphones deliberately mirrors how we currently archive our own lives—cheap, disposable, yet somehow permanent.
The oil paintings featured are his grandmother's, painted during the Nazi occupation of The Hague—she resumed exactly once, decades later, in hospice.
EE
NL
