Making Home Movies
Philadelphia, 2020–2022
These short videos were co-created with Burmese Karen and Bhutanese families. The film series emerged from the stories in ESL classes. Participants worked with teacher, filmmaker and visual artist Shira Walinsky and community leaders. The films explore intergenerational relationships and two stories of migration within a family. Migration can expose fault lines between generations where children acquire new languages easily. Children often play the role of translator and take on great responsibilities. Parents try to relay their difficult choices and lives in other countries. For both parents and children life in another country is an ongoing experience of Making Home.
15-year-old Hae Paw narrates the story of her mother’s life in Burma, their shared life in a Thailand refugee camp, and their mutual growth in the United States. How do traditional family parent-child relationships change when a teenage daughter must help the family navigate life in the U.S?
A story of a difficult decision for a father. A story of a separation. What is the effect of the civil war in Burma on families? A story of reunification with a daughter and story told from two points of view.
They meet again in Philadelphia.
Mother Dhan Tamang and her daughter Amanda Tamang search for nettles/sisnu in FDR Park. Through their walk, Amanda discovers stories of her Mother’s life in Bhutan.
83-year-old Gay Lay, a Karen woman and single mom of six, and her daughter Mu Nae share memories of surviving the Burmese army, life in the jungle, and refugee camp—and what Motherhood means to their daughters and granddaughters in the United States.
Philadelphia, 2018–2020
Shira Walinsky worked on three creating three films for this project, “Better Life, Bright Lights” with Naw Doh and the Karen community, “PLKK You Are Here” with Poet Ujjwala Maharjan and “Open City” with Ujjwala Maharjan and Meg Flisek. Each film is unique and used poetry and writing prompts to generate participatory films speaking to stories of migration and identity. Find the films on the linked vimeo site.
When arriving in the United States, newly-arrived refugees are given three months of support from a sponsoring agency toward finding a place to live, learning English, getting a job, and to navigate local systems such as school and healthcare. The “making of home” is a much longer journey, and a particular challenge in the face of such a fast-paced settlement process.
There is no definite map to home, the full scope of personal and social resources it takes, what forces may stand in one’s way, and when, if ever, could mark this process as complete. Turn the phrase, just slightly, to “making it home,” and the words seem to add up to an end point. But finding your way home, after arrival in the U.S., is about various intersecting processes: personal, social, and civic. The secondary journeys carry on through doing, willpower, and relationships that build and stretch across time.
For Making Home Movies, project collaborators come from many corners of the world who now call Philadelphia home. The Southwest community focuses on the Liberian community. In Southeast, the program includes Burmese and Bhutanese adults and a diverse student body at Furness High School. In Northeast Philadelphia, participants hail from Ukraine, Belarus, Iraq, Syria, and many other countries. Together, they have written and created films.
In each neighborhood, a filmmaker was paired with ESL classes and worked closely with teachers, storytellers, and project organizers to produce experimental documentaries around the project’s themes. The project highlights home as not a single domestic residence per se, but more so as a map of neighborhood spaces where lived social networks locate and strength the bonds within and among cultural groups can be shared through art. By drawing on both trauma-informed approaches and collaborative film-making, the goal is to find ways to imagine language learning classrooms as spaces of intergenerational storytelling, creative investment, and places to make home and hold onto one’s sense of self. Home need not be a final place or condition, but a way of balancing one’s multiple identities, languages, and visions, with others in the city. This project celebrates the global in local spaces.
Filmmakers: Marie Alarcon, Muthi Reed, and Shira Walinsky
Featured Storytellers: Fatu Gayflor, Olga Livshin, and Ujjwala Maharjan
Language Teachers: Meghan Agnew, Naw Doh, Amanda Fiegel, Meg Flisek, Moivabah Fofana, Melanie Menkevich, and Ujjwala Maharjan
Partners: African Cultural Alliance of North America Inc, The Exchange at Oxford Circle, Horace Howard Furness High School, PhillyCAM, Northeast High School, and Southeast by Southeast
Sponsor: Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services
Organized by: Paul Farber, Shira Walinsky, and Corin Wilson for Mural Arts Philadelphia
Songs of the City
Philadelphia, 2019—2020
A video and poetry project which looks closely at Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” through a video interpretation of the poem with diverse Philadelphia communities. “Song of Myself” speaks deeply to the spirit, soul and fundamental building blocks of life connecting all people. The lines, “My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs” are reflections on vital life signs, soul and spirit. “In all people I see myself” We are interconnected and interdependent.
“Song of Myself” embraces contradictions, multitudes, time and space. It travels and moves and breathes. Songs of the City is a project I have developed over time, real time, to the seasons. The poem accumulates, lists, travels, history, people from all walks of life and embraces the contradictions, aspirations and realities. How despite and with jarring realities of our painful history does it feel so present? Present in the language and present in that You are addressed directly. The poem is to you. We are connected through this place, through human experience, through our connection to nature, through religions and questions about the smallest ant, the atom and the infinite universe.
Whitman connects us directly into the natural world and the life cycle, “the smallest sprout shows there really is no death”, “All goes onward and outward and nothing collapses”. This direction comes from being present, “Now I will do nothing but listen, To accrue what I hear into this song”. —Song of Myself
Song of Myself is Democratic in its construction. Much of the poem is a list. All people are equal down the list, “the paving man, the canal boy, the conductor…” Whitman states the unknown heroes are greater than those known. This statement is true anytime, but became even more meaningful in 2020 as bus drivers, grocery store cashiers, meat packers and others risked their lives to work. “ Sounds of The City, Sounds out of the City, Sounds of the Day and Night” Whitman lines that bring us collectively back to our city Philadelphia. Its history as the birth place of Democracy. A Democracy flawed from the start with its contradictions around ideals of equality. Here we are in 2021 after four years of anti- immigrant rhetoric surviving a pandemic. In a city and nation where the fault lines of race and class became life and death, essential work meant going out meant risking death. The year 2020 has made me think more deeply about the Democratic ideals enmeshed in Whitman’s seeing himself in all people and vice verse. It has also laid clear the injustices of slavery and indigenous genocide and that the poem was written in 1855.
The end result of this reflection will be several short videos combining multiple voices layered on my own woodcuts drawings and film. This project began in 2019 in response to the Whitman@200 celebrating Whitman’s birthday, his connection to Philadelphia, Camden and the lived presence of his work today. The project continues through 2021. In the spring of 2019 and 2020 I worked with high school students at Furness High School. We read sections of “Song Of Myself”. We focused on the section “ What is the Grass ?” and “Unknown Heroes”. These topics resonated deeply with students. The students wrote their own poems in response, we discussed the meaning of the Whitman lines and they read directly from the poem and are voices in the video. Through my work at Southeast By Southeast a community space for new refugees from Burma and Bhutan I was able to work with a group of Bhutanese refugees to translate the meaning of sections of the poem. The voices of Nepali refugees are also included. Their feelings about the circle of life and importance of nature allowed for an entrance to Whitman’s work. “Song of Myself” is mind bogglingly beautiful, enormous, generative encompassing worlds, universes and minutiae of city brick blocks, wharves, ferries, granular elements that build our universe. “ Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” begins the poem and is the thought I follow as I work with communities and landscapes in Philadelphia to search for the meaning of this enormously powerful work.
The first iteration of Songs of the City involved a reading with Furness High School students, poet Ujjwala Maharajan and a video screening. It culminated in being part of the Whitman@200 readings at City Hall in 2019. This was funded through the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. The second iteration will involve readings and screening of the videos funded with support from the Independence Foundation.