Reflective Encounters

“A voiceover narration runs throughout Azar Saiyar’s My Home. It is fed through heavy electronic modulation and distortion making words barely audible without the subtitles. Together, the narration and the soundscape sound like a guttural nightmare from the darkest depths of your childhood, reminding you of those strange and surreal early memories that seem to warp with age to the point where we’re not sure if they’re actually memories or nightmares, so alien is the thought process behind the actions in those early days of growing up.

Elsewhere, black sand slips through a person’s hands, and a doll’s head is shown being taken apart, its eyes minutiously erased with a cotton tip. Suggestions of childhood memories? Even if they are, they feel like the memories of separate people, meshed together in a dreamlike, hazy piece of aesthetic experimentalism that marks out Saiyar’s vision. It’s rare for a narrative film to capture the unique muddiness of childhood memory – focused as narrative film is on storytelling and cause-and-effect. Saiyar’s work embraces the chaos of these remembrances, none more evocatively than in a lingering take of a train ride through a blizzard, the snow blurring our vision until it’s just a field of white.”

— Fedor Tot