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.