Thursday 20th April 2023
Towner Eastbourne (Studio 3)
Devonshire Park, College Road
Eastbourne BN21 4JJ
‘Home Movie 2022’ – Film and artist talk by guest artist Caroline Pick, introduced by June Nelson.
When filmmaker Caroline Pick moved home in 2012, she discovered a pile of film cans that had been stored, unopened, in a wardrobe for over 5 decades. Inside were her father’s 8mm and 16mm home movies, showing life in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s up to Cardiff in the early 1960s. The film she made from this footage hints at something darker: at absences unexplained, except for snatches of tales about those left behind. Home Movie is a story of immigration, dislocation, uncertain identities, and secrets: eighteen close family members dead in the previous generation but never once mentioned.
Caroline Pick’s Home Movie 2013 about her family’s ruptures and silences was shown to great acclaim at international film festivals around the world, but it ended with a question. Her second film, Home Movie 2020, answers it. Incorporating the earlier footage, it moves into the present when Pick finally plucks up the courage to travel to her mother’s hometown in Hungary - more than 80 years after her mother left it - and discovers the heritage that she’d been searching for much of her life.
Home Movie 2020 is a tender film about finding your family, long after they’ve died.
Blue Monkey would like to thank Caroline for showing us her beautiful and moving film, and for giving us such an interesting talk on insights into the making of the film afterward. During this discussion, some of the audience told of how the film had evoked their own memories of war and its effect on their life and family.
Caroline is an artist based in Lewes. After a long professional career in television as a documentary filmmaker, producer, and commissioning editor, she gained a BA degree in Fine Art from Central St. Martin’s, London (2009) and an MA in Fine Art from Brighton University (2015).
She is now a sculptor and makes installations. Her work is located in her personal and domestic life and in her immediate environment, physical and natural. The idea that nothing is permanent, solid, or stable, but rather fragile and transient is a major source of her inspiration.
You can find out more about Caroline on her website and via her Instagram https://carolinepick.com/
