Dearest Fiona combines archive footage from the collection of the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam with voiceovers of letters written to the artist by her father when she was a
student in the late 1980s. As we listen, Tan’s father (voiced by actor Ian Henderson) 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. In the background is the emergence of industry and urbanisation and the inevitable creep of modernity. Assembled from hundreds of hours of footage spanning from 1896 to the late 1920s, Dearest Fiona comes to life with the poignant ringing of a church bell, accompanied by sunlit clouds, a crowd on the beach, a girl in traditional Dutch clothing, brightly coloured by hand, and the dark lapping of the sea. The date spoken by the man at the beginning of the film – 2 August 1988 – is almost a century before these images.
Modernity thus creeps into the cracks of the past, showing a world in constant metamorphosis driven by industrialisation, colonialism and capitalism.
“By chance I came across a pile of old letters, hidden in the bottom of an old desk drawer. These are letters that my father wrote to me by hand from Australia more than 30 years ago, just after I moved to the Netherlands in 1988. They are well-written, interesting and often funny letters, and reminded me of a number of events – both at home and on the national and international scene – that I had forgotten about. My father moves with ease from small anecdotes about the animals in the house and the babysitting of Nikolas, his first grandson, to annoyances at work or major historical events. of the time: the Tiananmen Square massacre, the end of communism in Eastern Europe, to Mandela as the first black prime minister in South Africa . I marvel at his ability to summarise the major global events of the time and his calm and humane state in relation to world news. In hindsight, I marvel at the tumultuous but so important historical events of those events that have largely shaped the years and decades that followed. Long shadows.” – Fiona Tan
