If soulmates do exist then I would consider my mum my soulmate. Throughout the peaks and troughs of my life, she has been the one constant grounding factor. More than anything, I want to understand more about her, to see how she sees the world, to understand how she made me the person that I am.
“Through Her Eyes” is a short film dedicated and inspired by mum. Filmed largely from her perspective, I am able to begin to see the world the way she does. Through her lens I see her sensitivity to glimmers of beauty within the mundane, her love for everyone within her life and above all else, her dedication to me.
This film holds two perspectives; switching from mum recording me from behind the camera for the majority to the reverse towards the end. This mirrors how as I grow up, I begin to see mum less and less as an omnipotent parental figure, and increasingly more as a person who too has flaws, weaknesses and fragility. Our lives are two intertwining lines; tightly wound together even when sometimes we are pulled in different directions.
Mum has a recurrent dream; in the dream, she travels to places buried deep within her memory simply by turning a corner in a long corridor: a childhood home shared with her grandparents, her uni dorm room, the flat we lived in when I was a child with a big orange sofa and all year round floor heating. There is a sense of how we can be transported back in time through some catalyst.
The animated characters represent the past; the old toys I had as a child, our pets who passed away years prior and the like. I believe there is a vital essence within our lives which is preserved uninterrupted by spatial and temporal shifts. Through these persisting characters, we create a thread of continuity linking us with our past selves.
Finally, I incorporated a somewhat meta-narrative aspect in the film. Inspired by Takashi Fujimoto’s “Goodbye Eri”, I wanted to borrow the concept of a film within a film. Hence having the body of the film be filmed through mum’s perspective whereas the ending reveals that whilst she is making a record of the world through her eyes, I am also recording her.
Watch full film on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71iROoS7hpE