Piyu Somani
MFA ’23 Film/Video
dear aaru is an epistolary meditation on place and relationships. It is composed largely of environmental shots–geese floating lazily along the tranquil water of the pond in the Public Gardens, sailboats along the Charles River, trees and streetlights, skyscrapers and subway cars. The same things and places are shown repeatedly, across different seasons and hours of the day. Time’s hand gently shapes everything, even people and their connections, even across great distances.
As an artist, I find myself preoccupied with communication and alienation. Coming to Boston from India, I was forced to leave behind so much of what had been warm and familiar. Even the act of speaking to another person and being simply understood, which had once been so painless and automatic, had become something rough and uncertain. Filmmaking has, in many ways, been a place of refuge for me–an environment built and thriving upon communication, both between collaborators and between creators and their audience.
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Piyu Somani is a filmmaker interested in connection and communication in an increasingly alienated world. She values the collaborative nature of filmmaking as one of those few spaces in which people can still exist together, connected and yet at the same time disconnected from the world outside of themselves. Formally, she is interested in multi-channel and split screen work and the way in which consuming multiple images simultaneously create a perceptive “whole” that is more than the sums of their parts.
