Radicalized

Short impressionistic anti-war film to accompany the music of the Opera of the Unspoken, an ancestral experimental opera about WWII in Indonesia, then the Dutch East Indies. This song reflects the fate of my civilian German grandfather, unfairly interned by the Dutch, then killed by radicals in East Java as he tried to find his way back to his Javanese wife and mixed race children after the war had ended. The lyrics reflect the chaos, confusion and danger of the time, with details patched together using psychic dreamwork. Archival war footage and a few family photos are edited with special effects into a rhythmic, dream-like reflection of the central poem, reminiscent of gum bichromate photography. A creative work to address ancestral trauma in our family dna.