Where Have You Been?

This film is based on a walk undertaken by Poet Amanda White in Morvah, West Penwith, Cornwall. She left her home without telling anyone, without knowing where she was going and - most significantly - without knowing why she was going.

She recorded her contemporaneous thoughts in a stream of consciousness poem on her iPhone and filmed video at the same time. In the following days I asked her to return to that route and video more material. She went back five or six times often in very bad weather.

At times the strong buffeting wind and rain obscured the recording of her voice. Transcribing the original poem, she then recorded a clean version inside her home, in the calm and quiet. This was inter-cut with the original recording and created a challenging, questioning shadow character.

By the end of the poem we have a sense that she’s found something. Perhaps it’s something about herself, or somebody else?

One of the ambitions for the visual image of this film was to strive to exploit the defects of the mobile phone camera, to make it anti-digital. I wanted to replicate the defects and imprecision of human imagination; to force the camera to capture images so degraded – whether out of focus, struggling for exposure, or imprecise – that it creates rather than captures images that would normally not exist; to support the thought "I can just about make out real shapes of things that become other things in the darkness".