Inbetween

Sankofa Film and Video Collective, Robert Crusz / United Kingdom / 1992 / The film already had its Czech Premiere / 40 min.

synopsis

An intimate film about the experience of a man caught between East and West, between mother and father, silence and communication, combining family photographs and home Super 8 footage with fictionalized reconstructions of the filmmaker's childhood. The events of his life—his relationship to Western culture and to his father, who embodied it, his departure from Sri Lanka and settlement in Great Britain—are repeatedly rewritten. Shifting emphases and building tension between different interpretations create an image of identity that resists unambiguous understanding and remains in motion, open and changeable.

“Being a Portuguese Burgher from Sri Lanka living in England means I am neither fully of the East nor fully of the West. I am somewhere in between, like a nomad, always in transit, without roots or foundations. This gives me an identity that, like my speech, is unstable, insecure, and tempered. I feel that somewhere in that soundless shadowland, between my thinking and my speaking, lies the real expression of who I am.”

biography

Sankofa Film & Video Collective was founded in London in 1983. Its founding members were Isaac Julien, Nadine Marsh-Edwards, Maureen Blackwood, Martina Attille, and Robert Crusz—British students with diasporic roots stretching back to Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. The collective's work has focused on social and political themes, particularly issues of identity, sexuality, and postcolonial experience. It is also characterized by experimental aesthetics, a blending of documentary and fictional elements, and innovative storytelling. The collective's debut film was The Passion of Remembrance (1986). The film Inbetween (1992) is the work of Robert Crusz but was produced as part of the Sankofa collective.