Hello

Hello is a meditation on the past, inspired by the Silent Sunday hashtag and Sergey Cheremisinov's beautiful piece, 'Amadines' from Way to Silence (2021). All of the shots were filmed over ten years ago (you might recognise some from previous shorts). When we think of our past, we tend to feel a sense of loss, nostalgically missing the experiences we once had, regretting the ones we never had, or otherwise regretting the bad ones, borne of mistakes that were all too clear only after we'd made them. I will think, 'Damn, why was I so preoccupied with the little things, instead of appreciating what was good at the time?'

Of course, at the time, the little things weren't so little. They were the only thing that mattered, and my mind was occupied entirely of the worries they caused me. Sans a philosophy focused on preaching living in the moment, we have to actively remember to tell ourselves to stop and smell the flowers, otherwise we'd just walk past them, inwardly absorbed in our problems or outwardly projecting the fact that we're staying ahead of these problems.

Appreciating the present, meanwhile, is undone by the present's tendency to very quickly become the past. Some of the shots in Hello serve as a reminder that even these moments are fleeting and susceptible to being forgotten in time. Without having filmed them, I would not be remembering the 'freedom' graffiti, or (especially) the random shot of a flagpole next to a church in Bremen (or—an honest question—was it Bremerhaven?). In view of the time that has passed since filming, this little movie is a reflection of the memories themselves that have passed. Change is inevitable. In Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974), the character Bedap angrily excoriates his society's fear of change, saying, 'Change is freedom, change is life.' I want to embrace this ethos, and yet, why is it so excruciatingly difficult to actually do so?

Life would probably be quite a bit easier if I were able to embrace change rather than dread the unknowns that come with it. Imprisonment by stasis, after all, can be comforting, with tomorrows that don't need to be feared. But—again—change is inevitable. If we spend too much time in comfortable stasis, the change that sets us free hits us more like a thunderous hammer than the gentle of rays of a new day's sun. The harder we run from it, the harder it is to deal with when it finally arrives. And in this way, even appreciating the present can only ever be temporary, because stopping to smell the flowers must itself end in getting up again and continuing on in inward absorption or outward projection.

On our continuation, we may find another moment worth appreciating, but the previous one will be gone. Something appreciated today stays with today, because tomorrow will bring a new experience, a potential change. In time, most of them will be forgotten. All but the ones from which we will later siphon sweet nostalgia; the most dangerous ones, which, if dwelt upon too long, risk us being lost in the past at the cost of the present. Here, Hello carries a painful message. I'm grateful that I'm able to see snapshots of a life that was being lived over a decade ago, in places I haven't seen since, and though I may yearn to return to them, to reacquaint myself with old faces and hear familiar sounds, I know doing so is an impossible endeavour, and even if it were possible, it would mean forsaking new faces and new sounds, new experiences that I may yet cherish in a another decade's time. If there's any happiness to be found in getting ourselves stuck in the past, it's a precarious happiness.

I felt a tremendous sense of loss while editing Hello, but it was worthwhile loss. I found myself using the parts of shots that were slightly out of focus, or out of place in some way. The memories that had passed and were now reflected back at me were the ones that were, back then, mundane and mere fillers of time—waiting for the train to start moving, looking across a bench and seeing a sign that meant nothing to me, watching the fall of decaying leaves in anticipation of a miserably cold season—and I came back to that one question, 'Why didn't I appreciate it more at the time?'