Here’s a video Julia and I made in Ghent, a few months ago. We interviewed some people (Nina Fresen, Irena Teprtova, Tereza Mrazkova, Marc De Blieck) about what it’s like to be a fish out of water, with regard to being new in a foreign country.

I don’t have the original files anymore so you have to play the audio separately (it was originally a video installation where the audio file was played on a loop, independently of the video).

So first click play on the audio stream below, and then on the video below that. They don’t have to be synchronized.

Immigratie from Jonathan Beaton on Vimeo.

There are some parts of the video where you won’t be able to understand it if you don’t speak Dutch and/or Czech – it was intended for a Dutch-speaking audience, most of whom speak good English.

Also important to note is that sometimes the dutch grammar is not perfect – this is mostly due to being a rough transcript of the actual speakers’ words, and the speakers are not all native speakers of the languages they are speaking. I have to apologise for the spelling mistakes in the dutch though – I notice many now that I was too poor in dutch to notice at the time we made the video.

To quote myself from the video page:

The idea of the video is to decry the unfortunate associations many people still have with the German population as a result of their dark past being so frequently and overwhelmingly covered in the media, despite their having moved on and despite their longing for progress.

It is absolutely not my intention to justify Nazi mentality or behaviour from WW2 or today – rather it is my intention to draw attention to the fact that this history still mars, to varying degrees, the world’s perception of Germany.

I made a video!

It wound up being a bit ambiguous in terms of the message, which was of course not my intention, so I consider it somewhat of a failure. But I like it in parts.