Home Is Not A Place

With Home Is Not A Place, Clara Trischler creates an audiovisual collage gleaned from fragments of her family´s history. Narrated memories are combined with filmic snapshots from the family´s private archive. Looking back in time, the filmmaker´s grandparents report to her about stages of life and particular crossroads. The framework introduced at the outset of the film serves to contextualize these elements and resembles a scrapbook of memories. Biographical scenes are recalled according to a linear pattern, telling about life together in former Czechoslovakia, subsequent work-related trips to East Pakistan and Kenya. So it comes to pass that this Slovakian nuclear family is on the road when the Prague Spring breaks out. They experience the upheaval from a distance and decide not to return home - they want to provide their growing children the possibility of a more autonomous life and individual freedom. Their flight is accompanied by the unease of leaving family members back home for an indefinite amount of time.

The film is interwoven with Super 8 footage, and the graininess characteristic of this material aptly conveys a blurry aesthetic that speaks to the evanescence of remembered images. Meanwhile, slow motion sequences and partly faded images mainly transmit the grandfather´s personal impressions of the 1960s and 1970s. The accompanying narration does not directly correspond to what is seen: Clara Trischler is more concerned with the interlacing of various temporal phases intrinsic to her family chronicle, and revealing ongoing repercussions of decisions made in the past.

This painstaking portrait of Trischler´s grandparents additionally outlines an understanding of the roles played within familial structure. But above all, Home Is Not A Place tells about lives shaped both by uncontrollable forces and self-determination, and about the fundamental human need for individual freedom. (Jana Koch)