Private Project

A Family Portrait

An auto-ethnographic film that explores the sensory relationship between distance and memory and what role they play in an immigrant's experience of migration. After finding a family portrait on my phone one evening in Germany, I felt a longing for my hometown. I wanted to make a film about it. But how can you talk about your family portrait without talking about the reality they inhabit? They're the sum of the people and environment they come from. By using the archive footage from back home I wanted to take an audience on a journey leading to my home where that family portrait exists.

  • Shubham Sharma
    Director
  • Shubham Sharma
    Writer
  • Shubham Sharma
    Producer
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental, Short, Student
  • Genres:
    Ethnographic, documentary
  • Runtime:
    4 minutes 50 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    July 31, 2022
  • Country of Origin:
    Germany
  • Country of Filming:
    India
  • Language:
    English
  • Film Color:
    Black & White and Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    Yes - University of Munster
  • Berlin
    Germany
Director Biography - Shubham Sharma

An independent filmmaker, photographer, and writer. Currently a student of Visual Anthropology at Munster University, Germany. Most of my work touches on the aspects of migration and masculinity.
My mother ran a beauty salon in our living room. A long shelf there, filled with colourful tools, was my playground. Absence of human figures to play with, hollow pens became my soldiers, combs their motorbikes, and everything else turned into a world where I will continue to create senseless stories for years. Preceding, I believe, became the foundation for my approach towards filmmaking. There will always be enough around me to tell the story etched in my psyche.

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