Returning to one’s origins always presents the risk of claiming deeply hidden roots,
supposedly finally guaranteed. And the autobiographical enterprise is often
confused with the desire for identification, with the hope of forging a stable image,
fixing the self. Contrary to this fantasized anchorage, the project by John Di Stefano
gleans elements of a manifest and insoluble dispersion. Obstinately contradicting
the title of his film sums up his ambition.
Being elsewhere, being in several places at once, being nowhere: all of these
possibilities are at stake. The son of immigrants, he retraces the family trajectory
from the house of his forefathers in Italy that was left behind for Canada where he
was born, then New Zealand, where he lives. But the reflection thus carried out with
great delicacy does not only concern geography and the question of national
belonging. It is identity, in all senses and concerning everybody, that is at issue,
along with cultural, emotional and sexual identity. Combined with a meditation on
his homosexuality and his immigrant heritage are frontiers that are doomed to fade
away, just like the monument in Amsterdam, a simple line on the ground, in memory
of the victims of intolerance. (JPR)