A friend of mine reminds me that we are never alone—being embedded in the world entangles us with the ghosts of the past, creates a mutual reciprocity with the life around us in the present, and, as we reach forward, passes on spells and curses to those who will emerge after. As we become aware of our surroundings and stories, we connect to the undercurrents of collective knowledge and memory. Watching Ufuoma Essi’s short film Half Memory (2024)—screening at the 20th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival in one of the New Cinema Awards programmes—I am also reminded that this relational being is as much material as it is psychic. Drawing on Toni Morrison’s concept of “rememory” (a term coined by Morrison in her novel Beloved to describe a form of memory that is more than recollection, but a tangible and haunting presence of the past), Essi explores how memory is obscured, preserved and passed on through bodies, from one generation to the next. Yet, this embodiment is not reduced to mere biology; our beings extend beyond our bodies, touching the spaces and people around us, even when we are no longer physically present. Essi’s film, shot on a Super 8 camera over a period of three years across the UK, US and France, captures physical spaces and the bodies occupying them. Playing with focus and repetition, Essi weaves images of cities together with Morrison’s and other Black feminist scholars’ words. What emerges is a visceral study on both the workings of memory and its mediation through the camera; images not as static documents from the past but active (re)creators of memory in the present.

In Valentin Noujaïm’s short film Oceania (2024), thoughtfully programmed alongside Essi’s, spatial and material traces become equal carriers of generational memory. Noujaïm’s earlier films—notably Pacific Club (2022) and To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion (2024)—explore architectural spaces as sites of stories, emotions, and entangled personal histories. Oceania builds on the same conceptual premises and carries such considerations into the private space of an apartment, where the personal is equally affected by the collective.

The film’s protagonist Najib, a French-Lebanese teenager, spends his hazy summer days immersed in video games, basking in the blue glow of the monitor. Confined to a residential building complex, where he lives with his mother, Najib wanders the landscapes of the game. As he drifts between virtual and “real” fragments of the self and the world, we too are invited to submerge ourselves into the screen as the camera zooms into a blue VCR stop display; a nod to our active participation in receiving and transmitting images and their meanings.

Upon the death of Mr Albahr, Najib’s neighbour, the teenager becomes slowly obsessed with the man’s apartment next door. Moving away from the screens, he secretly takes the keys to Mr Albahr’s flat and starts excavating his neighbour’s life. Meticulously going through his things, Najib finds a VHS tape; on it, we see Mr Albahr’s youth and his loving embrace with another man recorded over a TV programme on the Pan-African Festival of Algiers in 1969. These images carry both Najib and us into Mr Albahr’s life more effortlessly than any words could: the camera, at once, embodying both the lovers’ longing gaze, and their embraced bodies embedded in the wider context of Arab decolonial resistance movement. As Najib’s curiosity continues to grow, he comes across a letter from Mr Albahr’s lover, Bachir, hinting at his migration from Algeria to the US and deteriorating health from AIDS. Through these objects, a history unfolds; a generation on the verge of oblivion (as communities of colour have been disproportionally more affected by the disease & lack of representation within AIDS activism) fighting for their rights to live a life outside of the confines of Western imperialism, racism and homophobia. Visually, Oceania’s every shot is tinged in melancholic blue; narratively, the film kinetically moves between present, past and potential for new futures. Similarly to Essi’s Half Memory, in Noujaïm’s film, memories are not only preserved but also transmitted and embodied through generations. In turn, the self is negotiated, mirrored, and anchored by stories that transcend time, yet are etched on the skin.

Najib’s uncovering of his neighbour’s life mirrors the process of writing marginalised histories. Intense curiosity always triggers a desire for excavation; the resulting fragments are collected through the cracks of legible memory. Indeed, where archival materials and memories obscured by trauma and death fall short, fiction steps in to fill the gaps and document in retrospect. As Najib dives deeper into his neighbour’s life, his body gradually becomes a carrier of history. Najib’s physical presence in the apartment fills the absence left by Mr Albahr’s death as his belongings slowly get taken away. In one of the most touching scenes of Oceania, Najib falls asleep on Mr Albahr’s sofa and dreams of his funeral, where his lover’s body is lying next to him and their friends are standing around them. If only for mere moments, Najib and Mr Albahr exist on the same immaterial plane; through the subconscious, their beings extend onto one another. This scene reminds me of Saidiya Hartman’s approach to writing with the archive. Coined as critical fabulation, it is a method she uses to write history by imagining the subjective perspectives and lives of enslaved people. Through Najib’s imagination, Mr Albahr gets the funeral he would have actually desired. The two generations are mutually indebted to each other–the old generation’s activism builds new futures for the young, but the fight inevitably continues, fuelled by their ties.

Similarly to Najib, I spend the festival days diving in and out of (blue) screens. A recurring thread emerges in my conversations, which also reverberates through both Half Memory and Oceania: the idea of film as transmission, as a lingering relic between past, present, and future. Art is yet another mediator—a material witness—of our collective memory and multi-generational entanglements.

Stepping away from the screens, I end the long festival weekend with Conal McStravick’s & Mikiki’s workshop Living Trees and Stone Soups (Tricksters, Quacks and Queers) (Parts 1,2 & 3), which follows the screening of Stuart Marshall’s films—Kaposi’s Sarcoma (A Plague and its Symptoms) shot in 1983 and restored in 2024, and Robert Marshall (1991). Drawing from Marshall’s practice, the workshop is built around the deconstruction of his AIDS video activism strategies and the historical context of his work. Entangled (literally by way of threads) with the other people in the room, I am invited to turn myself into a green screen through a game of make-believe. I am both a sender and a receiver of transmissions; a continuation of queer memory and defiance. While Half Memory offered ways to think about the materiality of memory and the role of images in memory-making, and Oceania engaged imagination on how images can be utilised to connect to histories of resistance and dream new possibilities, the final workshop allowed me to find meaning in the Festival itself. It’s in the shared experience of watching and processing images that we can develop collective awareness and continue to resist oblivion. We must take responsibility for our role in imbuing images with meaning and keeping memory alive through our bodies and minds.

Milda is a curator, arts worker and film programmer. Their practice is guided by a desire for connection and questions around art’s role in our collective liberation. Milda is currently coordinating projects at Scottish Documentary Institute and is part of the selection team for Glasgow Short Film Festival, alongside other interdependent curatorial projects. Their latest co-curated programme Collective Dreaming has been presented in partnership with the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow and Meno Avilys & SODAS 2123 in Vilnius.