Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico described time as a spiral, an endless cycle of recurrences of development and collapse. Time to Vico is constantly rebirthed through civilisations both lost and existing.
Much like Vico’s interpretation of time, filmmakers Priyageetha Dia and Matthew Chan view time as a similarly shaped entity—a whirlpool. While most films follow the structure of a beginning and an end, the flow of Dia and Chan’s films is akin to the cascading of an endless temporal maelstrom. Though both films centre around water as a visual vehicle, their personal interpretation of water as a sigil couldn’t be more different.
For Priyageetha Dia’s film the sea is a blue memory (2022), the embodiment of water lies in the diasporic experience. Personifying the journey of “indentured labourers who migrated from India to Malaya’s rubber plantations under the British colonial rule”, the sea acts as an anthology of the lived experiences of all that has traversed through its waters. Hope, uncertainty and memory are the human-like qualities Dia seeks to invoke through the sea.
