Passage

Working with Maltese filmmaker Emma Mattei, Teresa Busuttil brings together footage from Malta, Backstairs Passage (South Australia) and archival footage from Magna Żmien, a grassroots project, advocating for the digitisation and preservation of Maltese home audio-visual collections to form a community archive.

‍Passage looks at both passages of time and passages of water to consider the process of going from one place or condition as constant. Through this work, Teresa reflects on her late father’s life across the ocean. Born on the small Mediterranean island, he migrated to South Australia by boat, living his adult life as a diver and fisherman. In this way, Passage explores intergenerational memory and cyclical time with the repetition of the ocean tides as the force that underpins these concepts.

^{Teresa BUSUTTIL
Passage, 2022
single channel digital video, 7 min 12 sec
commissioned by fine print for pause ~ play, presented for SALA Festival}

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I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white
sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean.

She is an object of beauty and strength.
I stand and watch her until at length
she hangs like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come
to mingle with each other.

Then, someone at my side says; “There, she is gone!”

Gone from my sight. That is all.
She is just as large in mast and hull
and spar as she was when she left my side
and she is just as able to bear her
load of living freight to her destined port.

And just at the moment when someone
at my side says, “There, she is gone!”
There are other eyes watching her coming,
and other voices ready to take up the glad shout;
“Here she comes!”

‍— Henry Van Dyke