Online World Premiere: We Year at RestFest Film Festival

‘We Year’ portrays a narrowed and claustrophobic view of a hot summer indoors whilst experiencing an ME/CFS relapse. Houseplants die from a lack of care, insomnia thrives, there are battles with medication and stinky t-shirts, and the domineering presence of a wearable overarches all. A 16mm direct animation translation of this wearable’s ‘energy bars’ acts as a running measure of ‘crip-time’; Hi8 footage from the artist's archive of the outdoors sits next to digital footage of their immediate inside-the-house world; and a narrative - at times claustrophobic, ritualistic, or joyfully expansive - meet to describe the knotty, non-linear, chronically ill experience, with the curtailments that they must endure. Meant as a (love) letter to other people with energy limiting conditions, the artist ends with a message of solidarity: that we do not walk this path alone, even if we often are alone.