Director’s Statement

Every film in this programme is about a place I lived, and every one of them stars a woman named Sandra in the third person, as if she were someone I’d only heard about. That’s the honest version of events. Spend enough years far enough from home and you do start watching your own life like a film: from a decent seat, slightly removed, hoping the lead makes better decisions this time.

I didn’t set out to make a body of work. I set out to leave Tarragona, and then to leave everywhere else, and somewhere around the fifth country I noticed the places weren’t backdrops. They were writing me. Berlin introduced me to the version of myself that only exists abroad. Saigon raised the rest of her. Brazil made me tougher; Australia made me want to come home. This is the retrospective.

There’s an old film I love in which a man returns to his hometown and watches his whole life play back through the cinema that raised him. I borrowed its name, because it turns out I’m the same story: someone who kept leaving, kept coming back, and only understood each place once it was safely behind her.

I learned to build websites during a year that also involved living in a car, which is why this one exists and insists on being a cinema. There is no popcorn. The booking flow ends in a coffee. If you’ve read this far you already know how it ends: she comes home, and she’s glad about it. Enjoy the programme.