The ‘Emotional’ Gremlin:

FIRST, LET ME FINISH MY FEELINGS

Picture the scene, it’s my last evening in Bali, and I have a leaving meal planned. One hour before we meet for dinner, I get a DM from Igor, a filmmaker I love. “Sorry I didn’t reply; I’ve been super busy. I just listened to your voice note and track, and I love it, but you leave tomorrow. I can come right now to film something at sunset?”


OK, so what do I do?


1) I give up on my word and arrive late to my own leaving meal.

2) I meet the filmmaker last minute and shoot something on camera.


Of course, it has to be number two.


So, the Russian filmmaker jumps on his bike and drives an hour to meet me. This gives us approx 20 minutes of light. “Ok, we can work with this”, I think. I finish my work, go home, shower and get to the location just in time. We say our hellos and speedily go to the beach - Igor sets up his camera and asks me to play one of the tracks. At this point, I tell him these poems were freestyles, so I don’t remember exactly what I said. “I don’t know what we will do.” “It’s OK. Let’s listen whilst I set up,”  he reassured me.


I play the first track - because it’s eight minutes long, I plan only to play one minute so we can get a feel. Three minutes in, Igor starts crying - he feels the words, and I sink into them because they perfectly describe this exact moment. I watch the sunset in Bali, listen to the track I made, and get caught in the moment with Igore too. In the back of my mind, I think, “OK, but this track is ten minutes long; this means we’ve now only got ten minutes to film.”


I stay focused and remember divine timing; after all, I only need 8 minutes of footage. As soon as the track finishes and Igor has assembled his camera, I dart up and go into let’s get sh*t done mode. And Igor says something that puts me in my place. “Wait. Let me finish my feelings,” he says, as though he tucked into a delicious bowl of Spaghetti, and I took him out of his chair before he ate the last meatball.


“Wow,” I thought. He’s right. Be present. Allow him to go through the emotions; just because I’ve heard this track and become a little desensitised to it, don’t forget that it’s someone else’s first time hearing and feeling this. So I allowed us both to sit there, watch the sunset and melt into the atmosphere.

After that, we walked into the sea and got incredible footage of the sunset with my green kaftan trousers dissolving into the water’s edge.

And that was that.