This is my Happiness. This is who I am.
29:17 | UK | 2025 | two-channel video installation
A documentary encounter over a year with Miam Vyas, a singer from Mexico, now remarried and living in London. Fragments of actuality and memory are stitched together across two screens to meditate on the experience, engaging with themes of migration, trauma, family and cross-cultural belonging.
One screen – Miam’s story, a documentary. The other screen points to my world, predominantly through writing – film diary notes, an account of a dream of my brother in Moscow, dictionary entries, folk songs and laments - the past layered with the present. The writing exposes the omitted and unfilmed scenes to explore the notion of true image.
The structure of the work is inspired by Sergey Eisenstein’s idea of ‘contrasting independent closeness’, modelled on the Mexican serape (as described in his diaries as a montage method for his film Que viva México! (1932)).
Credits:
Written, directed, filmed and edited by Veronika Peat
Sound design by Mikolaj Tchorzewski
Cast: Miam Vyas, Vish Vyas, Luis Daniel Diaz Garcia