Passion of Remembrance & Golden Jubilee Trilogy

11 September 2021

Maltings Main House

New Cinema Awards

Run Time

85 mins

Intro – Herb

Passion of Remembrance

26 mins

At Home but Not at Home

11 mins

Letter From Your Far-Off Country

Passion of Remembrance

In Passion of Remembrance, Salad Hilowle creates a personal and evocative meditation on Black Swedish identity. Collage-like, Hilowle interlaces archive footage taken from 90s Swedish television with contemporary scenes filmed in rural and urban settings. The result is a dynamic and multi-layered work that interrogates, re-frames and reclaims blackness in Swedish culture.

Programmer’s Note

The film begins with footage of a 19th-century “blackmoor” sculpture in the gardens of the Ulriksdal Palace in Solna, Sweden. This work of imagined blackness leads us to later representations (and misrepresentations) of people of colour from televised media. Through clips from teen dramas, news reports, music videos and interviews, Hilowle confronts us with the limitations and violence of cultural representation. Abrupt edits evoke channel-hopping, giving us rapid and fragmented snapshots. Hilowle also deploys split-screen, carving the screen into four repeated sections, a strategy that invokes the overwhelming presence of media images.

These archival clips are interwoven with present-day scenes filmed using 16mm and 35mm film stock. As a counterpose to the media of his childhood, Hilowle creates his own representations of contemporary blackness. With fluid camera and sumptuous colour, Hilowle gives us tender and sensory moments, connecting the body with the landscape. Scenes filmed in nature bring reflection, tranquillity and respite, and the pace is noticeably slowed down. Hilowle also incorporates moving portraiture, filming a group of young men and women who steadfastly return the gaze of the camera. These sections function as a powerful reclaiming of representation, of Swedishness and of space.

In name, Passion of Remembrance references the Sankofa film of the same title made by Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien, another potent piece of cinema dealing with Black experience, identity and personal history. Here, Hilowle gives us a rich and vital work that addresses the complexity and diversity of Black Swedish identity. —Alice Miller

Director Biography

Salad Hilowle is a filmmaker and artist based in Stockholm. His artistic practice revolves around identity, memories and place. Recent solo exhibitions include: Vanus Labor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm (2021); Home Is Where the Heart Is: Part II at Österängens Konsthall; Buurha u Dheer (Passion of Remembrance) at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2020); Home Is Where the Heart Is at Konstfack Gallery, Stockholm (2018); Brev till Sverige at Tierp Konsthall, Tierp (2017); Erinra at Dalarnas Museum, Falun (2015).

Director Filmography

Passion of Remembrance (2021), Brev till Sverige (2017), Erinra (2015)

Director

Salad Hilowle

Country

Sweden

Year

2020

Premiere

World Festival Premiere

Dialogue Language

Swedish

Subtitle Language

English

Primary Contact

Salad Hilowle

Duration

26 mins

At Home but Not at Home

Sanzgiri’s first part of the trilogy unfolds to consider what one does with regret and to ask: what is the correct distance from which to examine its insights? In this film, emails, texts and skype recordings provide attempts at a remote connection with the landscape of his father’s village in Goa, which he has never visited.

Programmer’s Note

At home but not at home begins with an excerpt from a conversation between Hall and sociologist Les Back. Hall describes the diaspora as a space of regret, “a void”, representing an unrealised moment of history. Technologies of surveillance and extraction, like drone footage, google street view and 3d renderings are interspersed with scenes from classics of parallel cinema. As his father discusses the gaps felt in his experiences of “liberation” from Portuguese rule, and of cinema as a young person, ideas of physical, emotional and cultural distances are layered and complicated. —Jemma Desai

Director Biography

Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker working to understand how systems of oppression are informed and reinforced by trauma, history, and memory. His work spans experimental video, animations, essays, and installations, and contend with questions of identity, heritage, culture and diaspora in relationship to structural violence. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a Masters of Science in Art, Culture and Technology in 2017 and was a 2016 resident of the SOMA program in Mexico City. His work has been screened at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally. Sanzgiri was also selected as a co-programmer of the Flaherty Seminar NYC 2020.

Director Filmography

Golden Jubilee (2021), Letter From Your Far-Off Country (2020), At Home But Not At Home (2019)