snowflake, snowflake

The first time my twin sister and I experienced snow was also the first time we separated as we left for college. Before then, we had only watched and read about it in books and TV, and heard from our father’s accounts of his time studying abroad. This short documentary presents our conversation as we shared and reflected on our respective encounters with snow.

Overlaying the recording is a montage of found footage, most of which are from home videos and news reports. To my sister and I, snow is the stuff of memory and imagination, evoking distant foreign lands and different rhythms of life; snow comes to us as stories which we now retell each other.

As snow accumulates and persists on the ground, it overwrites and creates a new landscape both beautiful and harsh, mundane and extraordinary. Such is the process of making ourselves a new home of a strange place: snow marks our newfound isolation and distance yet also novel experiences that we share even apart. snowflake, snowflake is us reflecting on our tether to each other and to home.