This is my Happiness. This is who I am.
29:18 | 2025 | two-channel video installation
'This is my Happiness. This is Who I am.' is a documentary encounter over a year with Miam Vyas, a singer from Mexico, now remarried with her British-Indian husband and living in London. Fragments of actuality and writing from the film diary are stitched together across two screens to meditate on the experience, engaging with themes of migration, trauma, family and cross-cultural belonging. The writing exposes the omitted and unfilmed scenes to explore the notion of true image.
The work is an experiment across disciplinary norms, to create a new hybrid form across documentary, writing and installation, to address the complexities of contemporary lived experiences of migration and inter-cultural belonging.
The structure of the work acknowledges Soviet filmmaker 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