GOLDEN DELICIOUS, 3:15min, 16mm, 2025©
Golden Delicious opens in a 1970s Polish orchard: archive footage from The Archive of Home Movies shows a man in a suit moving between the trees, picking apples, tasting them, letting them fall. Quick flashes, like interference, cut to the filmmaker in a London park half a century later, re-performing his gestures. The present interrupts the past, folding into it in brief, flickering moments, until—in a quiet breach of the fourth wall—an apple leaves one era and appears in another. By reversing the 8mm footage, the man seems to catch what she has thrown, a small act that unsettles the order of time.
This is no neutral exchange: unlike a ball, the apple is held, bitten, chewed, its meaning taken in through the body. The film suggests the past can be entered, touched and returned, its meanings reformed with each encounter, echoing questions at the heart of quantum theory, where cause and effect need not move in a single direction. A soundscape of echo, interference and crafted foley deepens the illusion, as if the filmmaker were in the orchard of the past, recording the sound.
This 3-minute, 16mm work is the third in the Breath Memory series (Pamięć Oddechu), commissioned by The Wapping Project and co-commissioned with The Museum of Modern Art Warsaw. The archival material for this film comes from The Janusz Dybkowski Family archive within The Archive of Home Movies.
Mairéad McClean, copyright 2025
The film was commissioned by The Wapping Project and co-commissioned by Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie supported by the British Council through UK/Poland Season 2025.
PREMIERE:KINO Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie screened as a short before features films, August 2025
