Gabi Dao’s video-poem layers archival fragments, individual and family recollections, and lingering questions linked to Vietnam, unfolding narratives about intergenerational memory—both its legible recordings and its deeply visceral textures. How we remember, less so what, becomes a gateway into somatic residues, which spill from the gaps of official archives and constructed histories.

Yuula Benivolski’s mother always wanted a garden, and now she has one. Eclipse in the Garden is a poem about the relationship between a name and a place. Tatars and other non-Russian communities in the USSR were forced to go through Russification—the spread of Russian language, culture, and people into non-Russian cultures and regions. Forcing the many minority groups within the USSR to accept the Russian culture was an attempt to prevent self-determination and separatism. As a result, many people including the filmmaker’s mother weren’t able to use their mother tongue, eventually forgetting it. 

A group of artists engage in collective queer, desirous, and improvisational exchanges while eating oranges on a rooftop. The video reflects on feminist theorist Silvia Federici’s call to “reconnect what capitalism has divided: our relation with nature, with others, and our bodies.”

Interested in its parallels with the fate of the Jaffa oranges, the filmmaker speaks to her father about her intention to film the last orange grove in Los Angeles. Their disagreement transforms the grove into a space of contemplation on the politics of storytelling in the multi-generational experience of Palestine in exile.

Where the Forest Ends evokes a threshold where a place of darkness and confusion turns to clarity. This body of work uses the ‘language of flowers’ relative to my personal history and mental health. Citing the traditional Japanese practice of hanakotoba, in which plants were given meaning, this investigation into my roots takes the shape of a chrysanthemum. It is at once a shrine to the beautiful perennial, and likewise, a manifestation of emotional withering.

-Véronique Sunatori