Director: Emil Gasanov
Running time: 7mins
Returning to your childhood home is supposed to be comforting. After heading out into the world, to alien experiences where you feel like a fish out of water, going back to our roots can feel warm, familiar, welcoming. But what if the place which we once knew so instinctively no longer exists?
Returning to what was once home, but has now become distant and outlandish, can be one of the saddest moments of your life. At the time you were most hoping to reconnect with those safe, sunny days of childhood, instead it pushes you to realise how far removed you have become from that age of security.
The people who made the place – and those times – feel so certain are disappearing, if they aren’t already gone. The buildings and streets somehow feel small. You’ve grown – physically and mentally – and it is clear; there is no going back.
Emil Gasanov’s short film Home finds itself at the intersection between experimental film and documentary. Tinged with sadness, it is an examination of the impossible longing we have to return to those halcyon days, via our futile pilgrimages to the place we once loved so well.
Inspired by the video tape of his parents wedding from 1998, Gasanov retraces his steps to the now deserted house in Azerbaijan the family once gathered in to celebrate. A tent which once heaved with live, harbouring a raucous party, 28 years ago, now stands empty – tossed and torn by the lonesome voice of the wind. A bed where an elderly relative caught his breath amid the revelry sits vacant. A window looking out on an orchard of barren trees slams shut as a storm approaches.
The slam of the wooden frame might have made a nice moment of punctuation for the finale of the film – instead occurring some point in the middle of the first section – and it might have been nice for Gasanov to be a little more adventurous with his edit here. There is a flat divide between the old and new images – and that may be partly because of the clash between ratios of his 16:9 camera in the modern day, and the 4:3 of the ancient video footage.
But to see the shots of these places alongside each other would arguably have better illustrated the chill of finding them so changed, than keeping them so separate. Especially because both of these versions of the place live on in Gasanov’s memory consecutively. That is precisely the most disturbing part of the whole experience to someone returning to their old home.
Home does still find ways to translate a bit of this desolate nostalgia to the audience. Mainly, it is thanks to the very medium it is presented on. The buzzing, fuzzy warping of the extinct format of VHS – more than the outdated fashion, or even the 90s haircuts on display – calls to anyone who lived with it, and when we encounter it in the modern age of crystal clear imagery, it has exactly the same pang of regret as going ‘home’ after a long time. It was the feeling of home to anyone who loved movies in that era – but encountering it now does nothing to bring the era itself back.
Filled with striking images, and a series of powerful contrasts to bring feelings and questions alive in its audience, Home is a smart and evocative piece of filmmaking. It reminds us that however much we want to go back, time and distance mean there is no fleeing into the past, when we face adversity in our lives. Our only choice is to carry our concepts of home forward with us, to build a brighter future. And as part of that future, I look forward to what Emil Gasanov – a student filmmaker – brings to our screens next.
