In part two of my interviews with filmmakers who competed in the 2024 Australian Women’s Film Festival (AWFF), I talk to the creative minds behind the winner of the best documentary, Memorabilia (2023).
The 16-minute documentary competed at the Columbus International Film & Animation Festival, Antenna Documentary Film Festival, SXSW Sydney, Down Under Berlin Film Festival, Mimesis Documentary Festival and St. Kilda Film Festival, and recently won best film in the national category at the Canberra Short Film Festival.
Memorabilia follows a daughter grieving her father, and gradually contending with the inheritance that is his collection of space memorabilia. What does this mean for her relationship with her father? How does her appreciation of memorabilia change in relation to memory and personal history? Can an archive exist beyond its purpose of posterity?
Here’s what Ceridwen Dovey and Rowena Potts had to say.
Honi Soit: Tell us a bit about yourselves, as individuals and as filmmakers, and how you came to work together.
Ceridwen Dovey: Rowena and I have known each other for a long time, and our lives have overlapped in so many ways. We both grew up between different countries. Rowena lived in some truly extraordinary places while her father, an archaeologist, was working on digs and I just toggled back and forth between South Africa and Australia. After high school in Sydney we both ended up studying at Harvard as undergraduates, and then doing the same visual anthropology program at New York University even though Rowena finished her PhD, and I dropped out halfway through. We both also moved back to Sydney after our years in America around the same time, and reconnected not just as anthropologists but as artists and writers. When I began to write poem-scripts for short experimental films to explore the ideas of emotions and ethics in outer space, I immediately knew I wanted Rowena to direct and edit these films. That led to five amazing years of being creative collaborators on the Archival Futures of Outer Space film quartet, of which one of the films is Memorabilia.
HS: Ceridwen, congratulations on your recent book of stories Only the Astronauts (2024). How has your career in science writing and as an author of fiction influenced the subject matter that you explore in your films?
CD: I have always loved working between and across different genres and media, and have found that each form allows me to think and write in new ways. I’ve been thinking about the human past, present and future in outer space for almost a decade now, and trying to come at this huge, meaty topic from a whole range of angles. In my writing as a science writer or journalist, I’ve been able to push back against certain assumptions such as that humans have any right to mine the Moon and uncover forgotten histories about spacefaring, including the racist and misogynist underpinnings of many of the fantasies of space travel and settlement. But in my fiction and in these films, I’ve been able to explore some of the ‘quieter’ themes and uncertainties and doubts, without asking people to pick a side. Rowena and I have always said that the aim of our films about space is to simply create a mood, or atmosphere, and to give people a chance to rest, reflect, and perhaps emerge from this experience with fresh eyes: to see the Moon again, as a place of extraordinary beauty, worthy of conserving and not mining; or to think about the reasons behind the fetishization of space food and ‘flown’ space objects in museum collections and what that says about how humans think about space as a cleansing or spiritual realm, even for hard-nosed scientists.
HS: Rowena, you are an anthropologist of media and as noted on your website, are interested in “the entanglements of people and animals in urban settings and the complexity of our unfolding relationship to off-Earth environments”. What led you to that path and how does this translate in your work as a filmmaker?
Rowena Potts: I have always been a very visual person and consider myself a filmmaker, first and foremost. I also have a PhD in cultural anthropology, and have always had a strong interest in the politics of representation and the relationship between culture and media. NYU, where both Ceridwen and I received our training, has an amazing program that supports thinking critically about media production practices and visual culture. It was here that I developed my love for documentary — in the history, ethics and evolving practices and potential of documentary media in all its diversity. It was also as a graduate student in this program that I started making films.
One of my films was about pigeon breeders in New York City, and the deep love and connection that Dave and Carlos – two extraordinary individuals that I had the great privilege of spending a year filming with – have for their birds. Their tremendous care for and interest in pigeons not only formed a significant and therapeutic dimension of their lives but was also the foundation for meaningful and enduring social relationships within their community.
I also made a short film about the cultural significance of crows in Kolkata, India which is a place I love and have spent a considerable amount of time in. It’s not so much that I’m interested in birds although I do love them. My true interest lies in how we humans, messy and complicated as we are, are so inextricably tangled up with the non-human or more-than-human even if we are often reluctant to admit this. This interest has meaningfully extended into the Space Quartet films that Ceridwen and I co-created, where we think about our relationship to outer space, and the various ways we are entangled with what lies above and beyond us.
HS: Both of you are co-founders of the Archival Futures Collective. Could you explain your mission – pun intended – when making “experimental archival films about emotions and ethics in outer space”?
CD: These films emerged from our deep engagement with social and environmental justice in outer space, and a desire to prevent what has happened on Earth from happening all over again in space in terms of the only options or ideas for ‘human activity’ in space being linked to mining, profit motives, pollution and extraction. This is not simply a whimsical idea, but one that has great urgency. The orbital commons around Earth have already been ‘colonised’ by private companies launching thousands of satellite mega-constellations – and many more launches of these constellations planned in the coming years. The human right to a dark and radio-quiet night sky, or to starlight, is precious. But we didn’t only want to be shrill about all the things that humans are doing or have done wrong in space. Without understanding why space means so much to many humans, and why spacefaring is covered with a shroud of secrecy and silence, we can’t begin to change the narrative about what humans want to do in space, and why. The emotions that are attached to spacefaring are not often explored, because it has been kept as a zone of ‘scientific,’ ‘rational’ interest. The moment you dig beneath the surface, the whole kit and caboodle of the human psyche is entwined with all the meanings of outer space. We wanted to try to find a way to express some of that through these films.
HS: The film was a genesis of your tenure as Powerhouse Research Fellows in 2022. How much of Memorabilia (2023) was fact and how did you know when to fictionalise certain details?
CD: This film was such a joy to make, because it was a very special time in our lives to be collaborating. Rowena had just had her second baby, Iris, and she would bring Iris along with her to the Powerhouse – who were extremely welcoming of a working mum bringing along her baby while we were there as Research Fellows. We scoured through all the archival files, and visited all the space memorabilia and objects in the Powerhouse’s extraordinary collection at the Powerhouse Castle Hill Museums Discovery Centre. We felt the spell that those objects cast first-hand as we first encountered them, and were immediately drawn to the little packets of Soviet and American space food that had flown to space, but not been eaten. There was something so poignant about these meals and their descriptions like the cabbage puree, the cubes of cheese sandwiches, the tiny sausages in a tin and the fact that just by dint of flying to space and returning, they had somehow been touched by magic.
So we began to work on a script together that wove these details into an invented story about a daughter and her space collector father. We called the film a story blending fiction and fact, and this fictional narrative let us layer the space objects with emotion, for the daughter is angry at her father for his neglect of her, and is seeking closure of a kind. This gave us the classic structure for the film of a heroine’s journey of a kind, where she needs to be transformed through these objects her father so revered.
At the same time, we were obsessively watching videos online from the famous space auctions held at major auction houses around the world, and finding ourselves gobsmacked by the amounts of money that collectors of space memorabilia will pay for very random items, simply for their association with the ‘glamour’ of outer space. It was really lovely for us to build this script in this way, using the real objects for inspiration, and bringing the objects into play as mediating the fictional relationship between a father and a daughter.
HS: What did you learn from the collaboration with Powerhouse Museum when accessing the space memorabilia, and what does that logistical side of the film’s production entail?
RP: We had an amazing experience working with the Powerhouse Museum, who were so supportive of our creative process and provided us with an incredible opportunity to research, discover, think, imagine, script, and shoot our film. We learned to navigate the museum’s internal search engine to explore their archive, identify objects, and learn about the history of those objects and the curatorial decisions that led to their collection. Then we created detailed spreadsheets and lists requesting access to those objects that we hoped to see and ultimately film.
There is a very thorough process involved to make sure all these objects from space food to commemorative postage stamps are correctly and carefully handled by registrars, and credited appropriately where used. We went through all the established channels to get the permissions needed, and had the support of some amazing space curators who shared their incredible knowledge of and love for a whole range of space objects in the Powerhouse collection with us. This experience actually profoundly shaped the film’s narrative. Engaging with the research process, protocols, and logistics, identifying objects in various catalogues, locating them in the museum’s labyrinthine storage facilities, securing filming permissions, all gave us a deeper understanding of the emotional, social, and cultural significance of these objects. We tried to weave these insights into the very fabric of the film.
HS: One of the most effective mechanisms of the film was the voiceover narration by Matilda Ridgway. At what point did you make the choice to have the film be structured by a series of imagery and voiceover?
RP: I’m so glad Matilda’s voiceover narration resonated with you! From the outset, we knew we wanted the film to be constructed primarily from a mix of archival material and filmed space objects from the museum’s collection. Having previously made a film called Moonrise that combined archival footage with a poetic voiceover, we knew we wanted to take a similar approach with this project. As the narrative shape of the script began to take form, it became clear we’d need the right person to bring the narration to life. We were incredibly fortunate to find Matilda Ridgway, who is an exceptionally talented stage and screen actor. She immediately understood what we were trying to achieve, and brought a remarkable sensitivity, emotional intelligence, vulnerability, wryness, and humour to her performance. Recording her voiceover in the sound studio was one of the highlights of the production experience!
HS: I personally interpreted the film as delving into the fissure between what is ‘home’ and the protagonist’s journey towards finding home within themself, even if this traverses time and space. How did you balance telling this story about grief, memory, space, home, loneliness and imagination?
CD: That’s a gorgeous interpretation, thank you! And yes, you’re spot on. Objects need humans to place them into patterns and relationships in order to have any emotional resonance. We knew we had to temper the institutional feel of the spaces where we were filming in archives, exhibition halls and storage hangars with something that was personal. On the day when we saw the Soviet survival suit – the one that is lying in a huge drawer, and pulled out slowly so that you see the whole body, bit by bit – we knew that we had to use that as a key moment in the film, as an embodiment of her father, and this would be the turning point in the film in terms of her beginning to speak of her grief and find her way towards forgiveness of a kind.
HS: The final scene, where the Soviet biscuit that went to space and back is eaten, felt like a moment of great catharsis. Did you have any alternative endings or was that always something you wanted to leave the audience with? And how has the audience responded to Memorabilia?
RP: We absolutely knew this was what we wanted at the end. I think it was one of the first images we had when we began working on the film! There was an amazing moment when we were both sitting on the couch in the Powerhouse Museum Research Fellows room, bouncing ideas for the script back and forth, and we suddenly, in a hive-mind of creative inspiration, thought: “What if she eats a piece of this precious space food at the end!” We knew it was a bit cheeky to even imagine it, and we wanted to create that frisson of the daughter’s rebellion. Yes, she is grieving her father and trying to make her peace with that through getting closer to the rest of his space collection. Yet there’s still this one hard little nub of resentment in her, and she earned the right to express it.
In screenings of Memorabilia people in the audience sometimes gasp at this moment, which was exactly what we wanted: to lull everyone into thinking it was a sweet story, and then to find that actually it had a bite of poison in it at the end. We had also found ourselves wanting to eat the space food in the museum collection. Obviously we weren’t even allowed to touch it without a curator doing the handling but there was something so terribly illicit about that thought, and that hunger, we knew we had to give into it. Rowena found the perfect Biscoff biscuits in the supermarket that looked just like the Russian sugar biscuit that had flown to space and back. I had to act as the daughter due to budgetary constraints! I ate a lot of Biscoff biscuits the day of the shoot.
HS: Looking into future endeavours, what do you hope to achieve as storytellers through the use of documentary and archives?
RP: It’s been such a joy for us to work together, and we co-founded the Archival Futures Collective so that we could keep this collaboration going! I think we both see the incredible potential for combining original research and work in archives with hybrid, speculative, non-fiction film forms. That being said, I don’t think we necessarily want to restrict ourselves to just documentaries. As you can see, we are playing on the borders of fact and fiction. We’re really happy that the Archival Futures Collective has come into being through our creative practice. It has brought together a small and brilliantly talented group of people who all have different areas of expertise and will all contribute to the stories that we make in the future. I think a significant motivation of ours is to tell stories that are able to shift the way people think and feel, even just a tiny bit! And for those tiny shifts to incrementally help us find new ways to imagine and understand our relationship to the environments and ecologies that sustain us.
