{"id":218061,"date":"2026-09-23T14:13:18","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T20:13:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/errr-magazine.com\/?p=218061"},"modified":"2026-09-23T14:13:22","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T20:13:22","slug":"homesick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/errr-magazine.com\/english\/homesick\/","title":{"rendered":"Homesick"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nadia Bedj<\/p>\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n

How did the idea for this project come about?<\/strong>
Homesick<\/em> came from my own complicated relationship with the idea of home. I was born in Moscow and have lived in New York for more than a decade. At some point, New York became my home, while the place where I was born became somewhere I could no longer return to in the same way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I became interested in that contradiction: that you can leave a country, even escape it, and still miss something about it. Homesickness doesn\u2019t necessarily mean you want to go back. Sometimes you\u2019re homesick for a place that doesn\u2019t exist anymore, or maybe never existed in the way you remember it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenia came out of that feeling, and out of conversations with Russian immigrants around me. Brighton Beach felt like the natural place for her story. It\u2019s such a strange pocket of New York: you can walk into a grocery store, hear Russian everywhere, see food and objects you grew up with, and for a moment feel like you never left. Then you step outside, and you\u2019re back in New York.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What did you learn (or unlearn) while working on it?<\/strong>
While making this film, I discovered that homesickness can be incredibly contradictory. You can miss something you don\u2019t want anymore. You can grieve a home that no longer exists. And you can build a new home without completely resolving your relationship with the old one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What images, sounds or emotions guided the construction of the piece?
<\/strong>The carpet was the first detail that started the film; it was my generative image. Growing up in Eastern Europe, we had carpets everywhere, partly because the apartments were so cold. As a child, I used to trace the patterns of the carpet with my finger until I fell asleep. Years later, in my twenties, when I had just moved to New York and was subletting different rooms, those memories would come back to me and somehow warm me up. The film really grew out of that image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, while scouting in Brighton Beach, I started seeing apartments where an older generation of immigrants had almost recreated the homes I remembered from childhood. It was uncanny and very moving. In the edit, I decided to incorporate VHS footage of my own family and childhood as Jenia\u2019s memories, so my personal archive became part of her fictional one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brighton Beach itself guided so much of the film: the elevated train against the ocean, Cyrillic signs and storefronts surrounded by very New York architecture, older people speaking Russian on the boardwalk. Everything feels familiar and displaced at the same time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sound became another way of expressing that alienation. We mixed non-diegetic atmospheres into seemingly familiar spaces so that Jenia can never quite settle into them. 96 KBPS created the soundtrack by distorting and reshaping familiar sounds and melodies, almost as if you\u2019re hearing something you remember from very far away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Emotionally, I kept returning to longing, but not necessarily the longing to return. More like missing something you know you can\u2019t have anymore, and it makes you move forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Were there any conversations, movies, music, or books that made their way into that work?<\/strong>
A lot of the film came out of conversations with immigrants in New York, especially conversations about what \u201chome\u201d means once returning is no longer really an option. I was interested in how casually people can move between anger, guilt, nostalgia, and completely mundane things in the same conversation, like where to get the right kind of pelmeni (dumplings). I wanted the film to have that same instability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What was the biggest challenge during creation (filming, editing, production, or idea)?
<\/strong>The biggest challenge was probably finding the right distance from the material. The film is fictional; it is a character study rather than a self-portrait. Jenia is not me, but so much of its emotional landscape comes from my own experience. The other challenge was resisting the urge to explain too much. With stories about immigration and exile, there can be pressure to provide context: political context, cultural context, reasons for leaving. I wanted the audience to experience Jenia\u2019s displacement rather than have it explained to them. Finding that balance took a lot of work in the edit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What is your favorite restaurant and what do you recommend we order?
<\/strong>I\u2019m going to say shawarma from Tashkent Supermarket. It\u2019s a gourmet food market that originally started in Brighton Beach and has since opened several locations around New York. They have the most delicious food from home: Uzbek, Central Asian and Eastern European cuisines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tashkent also catered our shoot for Homesick<\/em>, so it became part of the experience of making the film. It was a real taste of home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Recommend us an artist you follow who inspires you, and tell us what you like most about their work or their way of working.
Ana Alpizar<\/a><\/strong> is a Cuban filmmaker and editor whose films I find breathtaking: beautiful, funny, and deeply sad, often all at the same time. I really admire the sensitivity with which she observes people and finds poetry in seemingly ordinary moments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anton Vicente Kliot<\/strong><\/a> is a Portuguese-American filmmaker and producer with a rare ability to make the impossible possible on set. He\u2019s the kind of producer who doesn\u2019t respond to an ambitious idea by explaining why it can\u2019t be done; he starts figuring out how to do it. He somehow finds a way to make a director\u2019s dreams come true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
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\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n

Nadia Bedj
<\/strong>New York-based writer and director. She received a Green Card as an Alien of Extraordinary Ability for her award-winning films and photography, including the Slamdance docudrama\u00a0Beware of Dog<\/em>. She received the Black Family Film Prize for\u00a0Homesick<\/em>, which premiered at Tribeca in June 2026.
instagram.com\/bedj<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Homesickness doesn\u2019t necessarily mean you want to go back. Sometimes you\u2019re homesick for a place that doesn\u2019t exist anymore, or maybe never existed in the way you remember it. You can miss something you don\u2019t want anymore. You can grieve a home that no longer exists. And you can build a new home without completely resolving your relationship with the old one.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":2641,"featured_media":218115,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"posts-nuevo","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17849],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"acf":[],"mb":[],"yoast_head":"\nHomesick - ERRR MAGAZINE<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/errr-magazine.com\/english\/homesick\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Homesick - ERRR MAGAZINE\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Homesickness doesn\u2019t necessarily mean you want to go back. 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