Not at Home

This script treatment addresses important issues in a pretty complex way, balancing the creation of interesting characters with the exploration of social issues. In projects like these, there are always trade-offs – focusing on individuals vs. groups, addressing an audience as outsiders who will see something unfamiliar to their experience vs. addressing an audience looking for their own experience to be represented and explored, use of familiar narrative choices and aesthetics to entertain vs. defamiliarizing the experience of watching the film. There are no right or wrong answers to this for every project – producers have to find their own balance. The writers have clearly thought these issues through already in many dimensions, and I would only ask that they continue to refine their work in keeping with these concerns. Ask yourself the toughest questions, perhaps in concert with those who can contribute to the project – performers, crew, people in the community being represented, friends who have inspired your imagination. This will provide the richest results. Good luck!

Presented in the form of a proposal for a film script and preceded by a brief theoretically orientated introduction, this submission can be seen as an original and thus praiseworthy attempt to bridge some of the problems connected to both critical writing and to artistic production as well as illuminate the themes of love, conflict, and imagination.
Some questions that arise out of reading the script are to what extent it conceives of the situations it describes as fully applicable to other experiences of migration, which experiences are being highlighted by the script, and which marginalised, and what is the relationship between the individually biographical and the fully socially allegorical in the film? An issue worth exploring, and thus broadening the project itself, would be to examine the actual possibilities and (pre)conditions for making the film, make the film itself, going on to note the dynamics of love, conflict and imagination as they manifested themselves in the course of all this, then examining how this situation provokes a possible self-critical reconsideration of some the ideas presented in the project here.