Yesterday I decided to leave my golden cage for a bit and attend this event organized by the Documentary Festival. Its title (Against the Tide: Creating Interactive Doc Projects using Internet and Mobile Technologies) although lengthy was not really self-explanatory to me, but it was to be presented by Wilma de Jong, a lecturer at Sussex University, and that spiked my interest.
I generally avoid these kind of talks mostly because of a few bad experiences I had attending some that were IT related. To elaborate, the feeling you have when a group of supposedly IT professional gives a speech in those events is something like the one you have when a group of people throw a cake in your face and then start laughing and pointing at you for about an hour. So imagine my distress about the poor IT when I realised that this specific talk was not only interesting but also very enjoyable. Of course, IT-problems in Greece isn't going to be the topic of this post, but rather the lovely Ms Jong.
You see Wilma de Jong is German, but she has been living in the UK for at least 13 years, as she claimed. This project that she is involved now "Against the tide" is, in a nutshell, "an interactive documentary project, which uses archive footage from the South East coast to inspire new films and start conversations about people, history and places". In her presentation, this joyful woman, talked about how "English" the people in the documentaries where with such enthusiasm. She asked us more than once if we could relate to these people. All the time I was thinking... "You have no idea!". I could only assume that Ms Jong has been truly enjoying her work and life there in Brighton. She must have been one of us, people that grow to love another place, sometimes even before we live in it. After the end of the presentation I left that room happier and all the more impatient about my moving there.
Soon I started thinking.. What is it that makes some people fall in love with another country? Could it be that they feel like that place suits better to their personalities? Or are they just unhappy with where they grow up? Is it the memories? The people? The landscapes? I guess the answers are as many as we are.
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