Canadian director Erin Weisgerber stated that her short film 'Black Seas' does not treat the cinematic archive as a record of the past to be preserved, but rather as material for rediscovery and the creation of new meanings. She emphasized that old images do not belong to a bygone era, but can reflect contemporary issues such as migration, borders, and identity, and that cinema is capable of reviving memory—not by replicating it, but by revisiting it from a different angle.

Weisgerber added, in an interview with 'Asharq Al-Awsat' via Zoom, that the idea for the film was born when she received an invitation from 'Cinémathèque Québécoise,' the body responsible for film preservation and archiving in Canada's Quebec province, to participate in a project aimed at repurposing severely damaged Soviet film prints after they could no longer be screened or kept in the archive. She stressed that this invitation was the initial spark that led her to complete the film.

The 12-minute Canadian short film participated in the 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic. It relies on the repurposing of footage from two films by directors Alexander Sokurov and Irakli Kvirikadze to create a new cinematic experience that contemplates collective memory, migrations, and shifting political maps, in a work that leans closer to experimental cinema than traditional narrative.

Canadian director Erin Weisgerber (Production company)

The events of 'Black Seas' revolve around archival materials that have suffered severe damage and can no longer be restored or used for the purpose they were originally made. However, the director does not treat these strips as remnants of the past; instead, she reassembles them within a new context where the images of the Black Sea and the city of Odessa transform into a visual metaphor for people whose homelands have changed, borders that never stop moving, and a memory that does not settle on a single meaning.

The Canadian director confirmed that the institution invited six directors to rethink the fate of these prints rather than discarding them, which she considered an opportunity to view the archive as a space for creativity rather than merely a warehouse for the past. She noted the irony that many of these films were not available in digital formats, and finding any information about them was a challenge in itself, as her journey began by searching for synopses, images, and scattered information online before requesting to view a limited number of these films on 35mm prints inside a screening room.

The director selected images that chart a clear path for her vision (Production company)

She stated that the selection process did not rely on the fame of the films, but rather on the visual possibilities their images could offer. She explained that she found in the scenes of the Black Sea and the city of Odessa a starting point for a film that transcends the place itself, turning the sea into a symbol of memory, constantly changing borders, and the movement of people throughout history.

She affirmed that the film does not seek to restore archival materials, because the original prints of the films are already preserved and can be viewed, but she was interested in the damaged prints worn down by time, considering that the damage itself has become part of the image's history and that the traces of scratches and erosion carry a meaning no less important than the filmed scene.

She pointed out that she wanted the interaction with the film to be a physical one as well, which is why she did not settle for digital processing, but instead re-transferred 35mm strips to 16mm before manually printing the images onto the strips. She considered this craft process to be an extension of the film's core idea, which is based on reshaping the material rather than simply re-screening it.

Regarding the relationship between the original images and the new work, she said that her primary concern was not preserving the power of the shots—because that power already exists thanks to their original creators—but rather searching for the possibility of these images saying something else. She explained that the real challenge was producing a new meaning using images originally made to serve a completely different story.

The film was screened for the first time in Europe in the Czech Republic (Production company)

She added, noting that the film views identity as a fluid idea rather than a fixed state, that history constantly reveals how political borders change, and what seems like a solid truth today may become part of the past tomorrow. Therefore, contemporary debates on identity often ignore this reality, even though all human history is built upon migration, mixing, and shifting allegiances.

She stated that what concerns her most is the ordinary person who finds themselves caught up in conflicts they did not choose. She explained that wars and invasions do not just alter maps, but drive millions of people to redefine the concepts of homeland and belonging; consequently, the film does not speak about a specific place as much as it addresses a human experience that repeats itself in various parts of the world.

She expressed the view that memory cannot be complete or neutral, because any film, like any story, chooses what to retain and what to leave to oblivion. She emphasized that cinema does not preserve the past as it is, but reshapes it every time it is revisited, which is why the archive does not represent the end of the story, but can instead be the beginning of new stories.