Letter from Moldova - Joanne Richardson

Letter from Moldova
28 min. 2009
Director: Joanne Richardson
Producer: Joanne Richardson (DMedia)
Production Company: D Media - www.dmedia.ro

Inspired by Chris Marker’s Letter from Siberia, this journey to Moldova is narrated through ten letters that reflect on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the contradictory nature of the current power of the communist party, and the uneasy proximity between post-colonialism and nationalism.

On another level, Letter from Moldova is a travelogue that brings to light the problematic nature of travel discourse and its affirmation of cultural superiority by portraying traveling to the East as a journey back in time. The video reveals the limits of the tourist gaze through the narrator’s own misunderstandings and inherited prejudices about the Russians, which have been a commonplace of Romanian culture since the 1960s.

"I am writing you this letter from a distant land. She lies somewhere between the Middle Ages and the 21st century, between nostalgia for a failed revolution and an imaginary hope called Europe … Was it our compulsion for traveling that first brought us together? Perhaps it was the threshold of the indeterminate that attracted us, the promise of a different becoming, even though its moment has now been lost. But in its failure we can still imagine remembering a future that never was.”

Premiere: September 9, 2009 at the Center for Contemporary Art in Lithuania

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