In Europe, however, one can find a number of autobiographical documentaries that address the tensions that follow emigration to European countries.
Such is the case of stands out for its effort to give an account of the lives of transnational families and for its remarkable way of using an invaluable family archive to tell the family’s migratory narrative.
In this sense their value as a visual memory bank or a deposit of the family’s past which can be re-visited takes second place to their function as a communications nexus that keeps the family united in the present.
This latter function has come to the fore in the last decades with the arrival of the internet, social media, and live communications, which allow transnational families to share images, texts, and conversations at a steady pace, widening the reach of the previous personal and family modes of communication and recording., directed by Sandhya Suri, becomes an illustrative case of the life of a transnational family and the role played by domestic technologies in the configuration of its identity.
This is even more evident in the case of personal and family media such as letters, snapshots, home movies, and home videos, which give shape to what Van Dijck has termed our ‘personal cultural memory’.Home movies play a special role in this configuration of family identity, as their primary role, according to Roger Odin, is to strengthen the family and safeguard it as an institution, providing a mythical anchor that protects it from the contingencies of time and the tests to which it is subjected by the world. This function, which was fulfilled literally when families sat down together in front of the film projector or the television, took place in an analogous fashion in transnational families, with the home movies filmed to be watched not only by the nuclear family but also to be sent to family members living in either the country of origin or of reception.
The home movies thus served as a much more vital way of holding the family together, like an umbilical cord that kept the family bonds alive.
‘Transnational family’ is a concept which has aroused growing interest in academia in the current era of globalisation. Bryceson and Ulla Vuorela have defined it as ‘families that live some or most of the time separated from each other, yet hold together and create something that can be seen as a feeling of collective welfare and unity, namely “familyhood”, even across national borders’. It has been discussed whether this term can be applied straightforwardly to diasporic families.
Daniela Berghahn, in an effort to refine these terms, asserts that ‘in the case of transnational families, mobility can be individual or collective, whereas diasporic and immigrant families are inevitably linked to mass migration movements’. Moreover, what characterises diasporic families from other types of transnational families, according to Berghahn, is the importance of the axis of origin and return:this vertical axis between the country of origin and the destination country, the ‘there’ and ‘here’, accounts for a particular diasporic consciousness.
Since filmmaker Sandhya Suri builds this portrayal of her family with the help of a valuable family archive of home movies and audio reels special attention will be given not only to the role of this domestic archive in the making of the film but also the configuration of transnational families in constructing visual/audio memories to share across frontiers.
Transnational/diasporic families and their self-representation Before beginning an analysis of it is convenient to briefly delineate some concepts and terms related to the issues brought up by the film.
As David Morley states,[h]ome is not always symbolised by any physical container – whether suitcase, building or coffin.