Louiza Vradi: Dust to Dawn

The film “Dust to Dawn” is a documentary that chronicles the life of Cuban performer Anna Ivankova since 2018 in Athens. From a small gay bar to a famous drag show nightclub and the main stage of the Athens Pride, Anna seems to be getting closer and closer to what she dreams of. In June 2023, she was found murdered. The aftermath of her loss impacted her community, society, and the filmmaker herself.

In a space where the present intertwines with the past, the juxtaposition of fantasy with reality is a key aspect of the film’s narrative. The nature of identity and the challenges faced by a trans woman are main themes explored in the work, with Anna guiding us into her own perspective; her vitality omnipresent throughout the film. Taking a collaborative approach, the film also explores the dynamics of the relationship between a filmmaker and the person she films.

An attempt to find clues to certain enigmas leaves more questions than answers. In many of the events that Anna wanted documented, she lives “dreamy moments”. But these weren’t the only ones she was living.

I’m trying to find the truth regarding this work. I wonder how cinema can become a place where we keep something we love alive.

Watching the recorded material reveals something I had not seen until now.

The work I focused on during the residency concerns a film about the life of Anna and my relationship with her. From the first day of the residency, my daily routine was organized around the film’s material. I projected recorded moments and experimented with editing, soundscapes, and small text notes that functioned as annotations. Revisiting the footage illuminated parts that had been obscured. I explored the significance of sound as an autonomous form of narration. Audio fragments, conversations, environmental sounds, and recordings create a sonic world. Sound allowed me to move beyond the time and space of the image.

I wondered what it means to share a research that so deeply concerns another person. What is the ethics of representation? The presence of my group was decisive. Evá, Priscilla, Éva, Kakia, Leonidas, Shaheen, Dimitris, Stefania, Cyanne, Sotiria, Ioanna, and Efi created a safe space for me to share, to converse, and to create. My meetings with Kostas, Ioanna, Eva, and Konstantinos illuminated parts I could not see.

During the residency, I was interested in exploring fragmentation. I tried to break a linear narrative, developing the work as a sequence of fragments, just as my own way of working is fragmentary. For the Open Day presentation, I wanted to share with the audience a part of this fragmentary version of the material, not as a finished film, but as an open process. I divided the material across three screens, creating a multichannel installation.

I returned to the landscape that surrounded me and Anna and walked again through places we had been together, recording the traces of those paths. In this wandering, I felt the need to also turn toward several of the people who were pivotal in Anna’s life. I met them, spoke with them, and through these encounters, I tried to understand the networks of relationships that shaped her path. It was not a collection of ‘testimonies’ but a process of listening, a search for the ways in which her connections continue to weave the memory of Anna.

In my research, I explored questions around the ambiguity of memory, the politics of representation, and the power of cinema to create communities and relationships. Beyond the personal and collective imprint of memory, I found myself in conversation with a theoretical field that guided me: queer and black politics, postcolonial and feminist theory, as well as migrant political contexts. I observed Anna’s position not only as an individual experience, but also as part of a history of intersections: between gender and class, race and labor, movement and loss. I approached the work not simply as a portrait film, but as an act of memory in continuous dialogue with structures of power and marginalization.

I saw millions of grains of ash falling into the sea. As many as the fragments of an identity.