Full Film - Memories That Make Us
Memories That Make Us is a poetic, ethnographic documentary that draws on the individual and collective memories of ordinary Italian migrants who made Victoria, Australia their home after the end of the second world war.
Director Biography - Martin Potter
Martin Potter is a transmedia producer, documentary filmmaker and academic. Since 2004, Martin has worked on participatory media and art projects with communities across Australia, Cambodia, West Papua, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and India. His focus as a practitioner is on facilitating creative spaces across a range of media and geographical settings allowing diverse, textured narratives to emerge that facilitate re-imagination of place and community. Martin's transmedia work include the SxSW Interactive Community Champion ‘Big Stories, Small Towns’, the acclaimed ‘White Building’ project in Cambodia (whitebuilding.org), ‘Island Connect’ (Sri Lanka, supported by US-Aid) and ‘Stereopublic: Crowdsourcing the Quiet,' winner of the TED City2.0 award. These and other works have been showcased at over 100 film, art and technology festivals internationally including IDFA, the Venice Biennale, DocFest UK and the Adelaide Festival.
Martin is currently a fellow and on the advisory board of the Deakin MotionLab, a community of practitioners working at the intersections of art, science and technology at Deakin University. He is an Investigator with the Centre of Excellence for Advancing Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH), leading creative partnerships and engagement of researchers with filmmakers and artists and directing a range of media including a planetarium feature ‘The Earth Above’ and a multi-user virtual reality project on Indigenous stone arrangements on Lizard Island. He is a board member of EngageMedia (www.engagemedia.org) which uses media and technology for social and environmental justice across South East Asia.
Director Statement
"MEMORIES THAT MAKE US: stories of post world war two Italian migration to Australia" is a feature length ethnographic documentary film that draws on the individual and collective memories of ordinary Italian migrants who made Victoria, Australia their home after the end of the second world war.
This film has emerged from a long-term research project conducted at Deakin University with the support of the Italian Assistance Association CO.AS.IT and led by Professor Sean Redmond in collaboration with Toija Cinque, Fotis Kapetopolous and senior researcher and Il Globo journalist Riccardo Schirru.
From the ruins of post-world war two Italy, hundreds of thousands of people migrated to Australia, part of the largest documented migration in history. "Memories That Make Us" shines a light on some of the cultural and social stories these post-war Italian migrants came with and how these stories transformed over time, offering a profound reminiscence and ensuring a generation of stories are not lost. This is also a documentary that probes how we construct out cultural identity and how our identities evolve over time. It is a film about traces and layers - about the human as a palimpsest. Like a palimpsest, we are written on by the memories we share, and by those shared with and about us. Through a series of chapters, individual and collective ‘memory keepers’ reflect on their own memories and how their journeys have intersected with the memories and journeys of others. These memory keepers talk, and walk, us through their memories and the moments, objects and spaces that contain those memories. Memories form and float like traceable contours across time and space. Each story told is a bright star - personal but connected, revealing a lived, shared history, belonging to a generation of Italians who made Australia, Victoria, Melbourne, their new home.
The complex interweaving of these memories allows both the memory keepers and the audience to step back for a ‘synpotic view’ of our selves both individually and collectively and to see the traces and layers - the palimpsest of memories - that makes 'us'.