I’ve just returned from my week in the Dales enjoying one of the generous residencies offered by Raising Films. It was a bit like going back in time – in more ways than one!
The village we stayed in had a distinctly quiet feel and looking through the primary school hall window you could have been glancing back to my own childhood, wooden floors, upright piano and gym equipment – I could almost smell it through the window. The landscape was strangely familiar to me from my current home on the West Coast of Scotland and had it not been so, I’d have been tempted out more often into the hazel woods, heavy with lichens, moss and the first show of wild garlic.
My time alone felt precious though and I’d committed to another type of time travel – watching back footage shot through the duration of lockdown. Weeks of neatly labeled ‘Isolation’ folders – untouched since we exited the pandemic. I was watching them back partly as a starter for the making of a new arts commission and partly to see what they held as a film taster of the ferment of family life under lockdown.
The commission is part of a Scotland-wide Covid memorial project – Reflect, Remembering Together but I was using my own footage to look back at being apart, going back in time to slow days spent squabbling over home school, clapping for carers, once-a-day walks and listening to the news. Thinking back on lockdown it tends to blur together in my mind so it was strange to be back experiencing parts in real time again – before we knew how long it would be or how it would end. It also felt strange to jump back in parenting-time into the day-to-day world for us four years ago – to things I didn’t see at the time but recognize now in my daughters’ different ways of interacting in the world. Four years are long years in changing-child-time.
For one week I re-experienced locked down conditions, but of my own choosing – just watching and logging footage and thinking. This time I did have the occasional café or cooking break and the company of other film makers, which was lovely. Even without the myriad of distractions from home though, I made much slower progress than I’d optimistically anticipated – but it felt like a start, committing to making work again after what feels like a long time apart.