In the early 80s, director Patrick Jackson, while still a child, travelled to Libya with his family. There they recorded memories on super 8 footage, which was stored away. In this experimental short documentary, Jackson revisits the footage to discover his mother: a young woman sun drenched and in the blush of youth. Suddenly, the footage is literally fast-forwarded to present day wintry Sweden. The woman in the earlier footage has aged nearly 30 years. Set to a haunting track by eclectic musician Franz Kirmann, this short film captures what it is to time trip through memory.

I am completely fascinated by the mutable nature of memory. It is something that has only a tentative connection to events as they actually happened, and it is something that can powerfully overcome us at any moment. While walking down the street, drinking tea or negotiating a business deal, we can suddenly be assaulted by memory. That is when we start to time trip.

When I first heard the song “Liza” by Franz Kirmann, it took me on one of these time trips, back to the desert of Libya where I had spent part of my youth with my family. And, then, it fast forwarded me to my native cold and white Sweden. I was compelled to find a way to juxtapose these two conflicting places. The key was a woman. In Libya, my father had taken rolls of super 8 footage of my mother in her youth and of us kids. I began to formulate this idea of those images breathing a story into this very abstract music. It is the story of a woman on the verge of old age remembering her youth. The super 8 footage represents the memory. For the present, I travelled to Sweden to shoot my mother in the winter of her life and in the Swedish winter as well. I like the stark contrast between summer and winter, youth and age, memory and reality. I would like to think of this film as a sort of experimental documentary that reflects on things past and a succumbing to the present life that the past has created.