Photographer & Filmmaker
Some songs don't get written,
they instead get carried through a heartbreak, a migration or a memory that just won't leave. And at some point, they find their way out.
For me, the greatest songs come from the deepest aches and the brightest yearnings. Perhaps songs of longing, and belonging.
These are portraits of women who carry those songs. Each one filmed in a single take in a space that holds that can hold that song.
This project was made possible with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts
"This song is, inspired by my own struggles as a woman, I've often wanted to not be defined by my gender but ever since I started doing professional work, it has become more and more evident to me that it's seemingly inescapable, and I would like to anchor myself in my female identity, and at the same time, the song is very, much about how my vision of us as humans is that we are beyond our genders. It's about who we are in our souls and not who we are in our bodies." - Aida
Djuna wove a sea shanty from salt and memory, each line a rope tossed between longing and belonging; her voice rode the swell like a lantern on a dark deck, calling home.
She once told me, as we were discussing the song: "Some loves feel like standing in the sun. You don't want to move. You don't care if it burns."
Annahstasia recounts the story of all stories, the careless abandon one oneself, to fall in.
In the Rhodope Mountains, songs were passed down the way thread was spun: by hand, in the evening, in someone's home, with others around. Kozhilyo is one of those songs. It calls the unmarried ones together, the girls to spin, the guys to play their gaidas, to meet each other across the way. Then Razvivai begins, and the mood shifts. A bride stands under a walnut tree, watching goldsmiths and tailors prepare her gifts. She looks out and sees a hill. Behind it, another. The distance between where she came from and where she now belongs has no name… only a song.
Eva woke up one morning with a melody already in her head; a song about someone leaving, or maybe about herself, afraid to fly.
She tried to dress it up, layered it, brought in different bands, gave it to flamenco, gave it to jazz. None of it stuck. What stayed was the simplest thing: her voice, a guitar, and the song as it first came to her. We recorded this in Granada, the city where she had first fallen in love with flamenco, where a friend had once sat with her and helped her with the chords, and told her she could do it. Years later, she is back in that same city, with some of those same people, and the birds are still in the mountains.
The song is called Paxarín - “little bird” - and she still isn't sure if the bird is the lover who flew away, or herself, finally ready to fly.
Tonina told us about how she grew up speaking Sicilian alongside English... About the songs that swirled around her childhood. When we spoke of longing and belonging, she told us about Mi Votu e Mi Rivotu ("I toss and turn"), and how deeply she resonated with its yearning and its pain since childhood. It’s an ancient Sicilian song, about a woman who lies awake all night, turning in her bed, contemplating the beauty of someone she loves until the darkness becomes morning.
Elena wrote this after she lost her father. The questions that came weren't the ones she expected. How does the world transform our bodies, papa. How do we become part of something we never chose. How do these small hands — her hands, her child's hands — find their way in all of this.
Some loves ask you to disappear a little. And you do. Because it feels like devotion. Annahstasia sings from a page of her own life, her own struggles and her arrival at reclaiming herself.
Lynn once told me something about this song that I will never forget: "A man once told me 'Darbak Khadra' — may your path be green. I will always remember the soothing effect it had on me. How green I want this path to be. And how rocky sometimes it can get. The song asks about a lover who lost his way to my heart. I've been searching for his eyes under the moonlight ever since."
When we were shooting “Le Temps” for Beautiful Mess, Lynn told me all about “Le Temps” (“Time”)… and how in relationships we get lost in the day to day… the arguments… and how time suddenly stops being something you share and becomes something that divides you.
Where does all of this happen, I thought.. where can we shoot this?“The kitchen! Of course it’s the kitchen!”
Lynn on the counter, Ivan leaning against the sink, Paris outside, time stopped.
Some songs are not written so much as remembered. Per la pau — For peace — is Djuna's call to something older than politics, older than borders. Mothers living inside the cells of their children. The instinct of love and life, waiting to be woken.
She sang it in Catalan, her mother tongue, in Berlin.