A short portrait of the filmmaker’s mother at home in Nicosia. Now retired, she devotes herself to learning new skills including drawing, playing piano, painting Greek Orthodox icons and taking university classes in history and ancient Greek mythology. Anastassiou’s camera focuses on her mother’s hand gestures as she draws, speaks, plays, and describes various modes of note-taking – and we think of the daughter’s hands holding the Bolex camera.

The title refers to the phonetic vocalisation of Lapwing bird- song, one of the most frequent visitors to Rainham marshes in Purfleet, Essex. Situated on the edgeland between city and countryside in the transient landscape of the Thames Estuary, this is a place layered with the traces of ever-shifting global narratives of empire, industry and movement of people and goods. Anastassiou explores how this pocket of nature is contained and consumed by focusing on the figure of the bird watcher. The film follows a walk from day to night along the inner and outer peripheries of the reserve, shot on a hand-cranked 16mm camera.

In the Port of Tilbury—a place which historically was the point of entry for migrants to the UK—filmmaker Maria Anastassiou worked collaboratively with a group of people who had recently arrived in the town to paint a portrait of life in the transient space of the Thames Estuary.

As a family revisits diaries and cassettes recounting invasion and refugeehood, this film asks how history is mediated across generations.