back home

90 min | creative documentary | 2022 | HD | 16mm | Super8

directed by Nisha Platzer
produced by Joella Cabalu

Telefilm Talent to Watch fund, Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council & National Film Board
2022

'back home' follows filmmaker, Nisha Platzer’s pursuit to get to know her older brother, Josh, twenty years after he took his own life. As she connects with the friends who knew him best as a teen, a complex portrait emerges. Through intimate recollections re-imagined on Super8 and 16mm film, and lyrical images hand-processed with plants, seaweed, soil and ashes, ‘back home’ floats between memory and present time in a fragmented meditation on identity, grief and loss: illuminating the transformative power of healing in community.

“There’s a stark tactility to the images of back home, as well as a haunting, ethereal quality … [Platzer’s film] offers a poignant, personal consideration of family, wellness, and the (im)permanence of all things that walk the earth.”

- Pat Mullen, POV Magazine


“pushes the documentary form”

“a poetic, sensory portrait of what it feels like to lose a sibling”
- STIR

Photo credit: Jeremiah Reyes; Poster by Julia Pepler