Award-winning filmmaker Nisha Platzer’s, deeply personal documentary feature debut “back home” will play for audiences in Toronto as the opening night film at Rendezvous with Madness 2023.
back home follows the filmmaker’s pursuit to get to know her older brother, Josh, twenty years after he took his own life. Over a five year period, she connects with the friends who knew him best as a teenager – his found family. Through intimate recollections re-imagined on 16mm and Super8 film, and lyrical, celluloid visuals hand-processed in plants, seaweed, soil and ashes, back home floats between memory and present time in a fragmented meditation on identity, loss, and grief: exploring the transformative power of healing in community.
After three sold out screenings at its World Premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival last fall and a film festival run which included RIDM in Montreal, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and Local Sightings in Seattle, back home will premiere for audiences in Toronto for the first time on Friday Oct 27th, 2023 @ 6:30 PM at the CAMH Auditorium. Platzer will be in attendance for a post film Q&A moderated by Victor Stiff, Senior Critic at That Shelf.
“Bringing this film to Toronto as the opening night film of Rendezvous with Madness Festival is an immense honour,” says Platzer. “Rendezvous with Madness is the perfect festival to host our film, where art is used as an entry point to create dialogue about mental health. My wish with the film is that it goes beyond my personal story and calls upon the viewer to see their own experiences reflected within its layers.”
back home’s unique handmade quality recalls the photochemical processes Platzer found solace in after her brother’s death and uses abstract celluloid images to represent the changing chemistry of Josh’s brain. The abstract sections are filmed on 16mm and Super8, then manually altered to create a beautiful and disturbing visual quality. The use of hand processing techniques, such as solarization, contact printing, tinting and toning, scratching and puncturing the film, result in a mixture of textures, colours, and light. Similar to processes used in Jacquelyn Mills’ acclaimed environmental documentary Geographies of Solitude released in 2022, plants and seaweed from the west coast mountains and pacific ocean were used as a film developer in some sequences, and in others, the film was buried in the earth along with Josh’s ashes near the train tracks where he found refuge. Fittingly, these places – the ocean, the mountains, and the train tracks – are where Josh asked that his ashes be scattered.
The techniques and imagery throughout the film are placed rhythmically throughout the journey as a kind of sanctuary from trauma, offering moments for contemplation. The film is an invitation to audiences to bear witness to a non-linear healing process, take stock of their own experiences and find catharsis in a communal setting – the cinema.
The film was selected for the Docs-in-Progress Canadian Showcase at Cannes 2022 (supported by RIDM, Telefilm and Hot Docs) and continued its national premiere at RIDM (Montreal International Documentary Festival) as part of the New Visions Competition, Qathet International Film Festival in Powell River, BC, and Antimatter Media Art in Victoria, BC. Much of the film’s journey takes place in Platzer’s hometown of Vancouver, featuring familiar locales like Spanish Banks and Cypress Mountain, but also the newer development, the Arbutus Greenway, which was formerly the Canadian Pacific Railway train tracks, where Josh and his friends would hang out in the 90s.
back home was written and directed by Nisha Platzer (Vaivén), co-written and edited by Jenn Strom (The Road Forward), produced by Joella Cabalu (On Falling), with cinematography by Suzanne Friesen (Be Still) and Flávio Rebouças (Pattaki), editing and additional cinematography by Milena Salazar (Highway to Heaven), music and sound design by Todd Macdonald – Norvaiza (Silver Pools) and executive produced by John Bolton (Doug and the Slugs and Me).
The film was produced with the participation of Telefilm Canada and the Talent Fund and made possible with the support of The Canada Council for the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, NFB Filmmaker Assistance Program and Cannes Docs Marché du Film. back home was filmed in Vancouver and Sooke, Canada on the traditional and unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-waututh), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), and T’Sou-ke Nations, and in Havana, Cuba.