Dearest Fiona combines archive footage from the collection of the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam – hours of footage from 1896 to the late 1920s – with the voice-over of letters written to the artist by her father when she was a student in the late 1980s. As we listen, Tan’s father writes about the fall of the Soviet Union, the civil unrest in China and the daily life of the Tan family itself in Australia: through the images of the past we observe men and women working the land and harvesting the fruits of the sea, we see cows in the fields and old men smoking their pipes, sailboats bobbing on the horizon. Modernity thus creeps into the cracks of the past, showing a world in constant metamorphosis driven by industrialisation, colonialism and capitalism.
