Patrick Jackson’s experimental short documentary “Liza” will premiere at the London Short Film Festival in January. It has been nominated for best experimental short.
Patrick Jackson talks about his reasons for making the film:
“I am completely fascinated by the mutable nature of memory. It is something that has only a tentative connection to events as they actually happened, and it is something that can powerfully overcome us at any moment. While walking down the street, drinking tea or negotiating a business deal, we can suddenly be assaulted by memory. That is when we start to time trip.
When I first heard the song “Liza” by Franz Kirmann, it took me on one of these time trips, back to the desert of Libya where I had spent part of my youth with my family. And, then, it fast forwarded me to my native cold and white Sweden. I was compelled to find a way to juxtapose these two conflicting places. The key was a woman.
In Libya, my father had taken rolls of super 8 footage of my mother in her youth and of us kids. I began to formulate this idea of those images breathing a story into this very abstract music. It is the story of a woman on the verge of old age remembering her youth. The super 8 footage represents the memory. For the present, I traveled to Sweden to shoot my mother in the winter of her life and in the Swedish winter as well. I like the stark contrast between summer and winter, youth and age, memory and reality. I would like to think of this film as a sort of experimental documentary that reflects on things past and a succumbing to the present life that the past has created.”
