Fields Fallen from Distant Songs (2023)

Overview

Loosely inspired by Jeffereis’ great-grandparents’ history as Japanese immigrant labourers on Hawaiian sugarcane plantations, the film contends with contemporary questions of sovereignty, solidarity, and hauntings of the past as they persist in the present. A cross-temporal narrative unfolds as ghostly images flicker across the screen: found footage of workers on the plantations interspersed with Japanese folk songs, poetry, 16mm home movies shot by her grandfather in the 1960s, and the artist’s own footage of the eruption of Kīlauea in January 2023. The material, economic, and cultural connotations of sugar are inextricable from histories of migration and displacement. Jeffereis attempts to reframe this narrative by exploring notions of rematriation—of returning ancestral land.