Your first video story was My Lovely Day, which brings us back to Vryburg and your family history.

In My Lovely Day, I cut sequences from my mum's 8mm home movies that she took of our family life in the 50s and 60s, and the more public events that were caught in the sweep of her camera, and combined these with music and the remembered words of my grandmother, presented as subtitles. I wove the story of three generations of women, as a kind of transgenerational haunting. The story compresses historical time into one day, with my grandmother reflecting, ‘After all my travels, that I should end up in this godforsaken place.’ Vryburg! This is how she began her stories to us, her grandchildren, about her emotional and literal journeys between England and Greece, Turkey and South Africa. The historical moment of her telling is apartheid South Africa, but her references to social turmoil and catastrophe are to earlier times: the ‘exchange of populations’ following the Greco-Turkish conflict of 1919– 1922, the massive migrations sparked by the two World Wars and the beginnings of the decolonization of Africa. I called My Lovely Day a true story, as in the truth of experience. It wants to be ‘true’ not only in the way memory functions as fragment, but also in how the celluloid is an ineluctable physical trace of events which we take to have actually happened, of people (now dead) caught in a moment of life. So the story of my grandmother set the type and form of my later films.

You became the archivist of the family. But you were also intervening in that archive.

When my mother was critically ill, I went to Australia to pack up her flat. I realized I was responsible for her archive. A few reels of her home movies were in one of the piles I made. And now they feature in My Lovely Day. And when I wrote the text for the film, it was as if my grandmother was speaking through me. I was on deadline, so I woke at four in the morning. It was as if the story came through my fingers and into the computer. The story – and her laconic tone – was perfect – almost.