Unsettling Connections, 2025
Short film
Duration: 5 min. 25 sec.
Textile installation
Unsettling Connections is a short film constructed from the memories of three women. These memories form the film’s narrative, emerging from bodily experience, heard stories, and imagined fragments. They are at once deeply personal and collectively resonant.
The film was developed through a survey sent to three women across different cultural landscapes, each of whom was invited to reflect on their relationship with their mother. Their responses were fragmented, reshaped, and interwoven, giving rise to a new narrative structure. While the voices originate from diverse contexts, the film weaves them together through the visual thread of Leyli’s Soviet experience, which carries the imagery throughout. As the visuals unfold, the viewer drifts between reality and fiction, gradually losing certainty over what is remembered and what is imagined. Objects and photographs recur as central elements within the film’s visual landscape, tracing questions of origin, inheritance, and memory. Among them, an exaggerated red scarf, derived from the Soviet Young Pioneer scarf, serves as a charged symbol of discipline, belonging, and care. The film approaches “home” not as a fixed place, but as an emotional space shaped by maternal relationships, inherited roles, and unspoken rituals, something formed through memory rather than physical space.
The film moves between intimacy and rupture, presence and absence, tenderness and tension. The mother appears as both anchor and echo, constantly present, yet never fully grasped. Memory clings, erodes, and reforms. In the process of making the film, the shared testimonies became companions, voices that echoed across different lives and histories, shaping a collective yet unresolved space of reflection.
Unsettling Connections features music from “If Places Were Sounds” by Les Biologistes Marins.