You explore the memorialised and forgotten sites of mass graves in Southern Poland. How did you come to discover their existence?

I was working on a wider project about unmemorialised sites of atrocity from the Roma Holocaust and had spent a few weeks travelling to sites in Hungary and then through Slovakia to Poland. I was aware of this cluster of villages in Poland and their history as I had been communicating with the director of the local museum, but I hadn’t planned to go there on that trip. A series of events led me there on the day before I was due to travel back to the UK. The museum director drew me maps of cemeteries on post-it-notes and I spent the day driving around photographing them. In one village I met Zofia and she took me by the hand and led me into the forest beside her house to show me the indentation in the ground that was the site of a mass grave from 1942. She was distressed and desperate to talk to me. I came back a few months later to record her story and then proceeded to meet the other people that appear in the film.

What led you to interview the five elderly villagers about their memories? How key is testimony to your work?

I’ve been working with testimony for a long time, and interviewing people is generally the starting point in my research process, although I don’t always use the testimony in the final work. Going through the process of interviewing people is about paying attention, not only to what people say, but how and why they say things. When the people I interviewed in Poland started to talk, the emotion was evident in their words and gestures. Four of them were telling their stories for the first time. They felt a responsibility to the people who had been killed, and it was literally as if they were handing that responsibility to me. I didn’t go out to Central Europe to meet people, I went to film landscapes. But I did meet people and they told me things that I wasn’t expecting to hear and for some of them, telling me had an impact on their lives.

How did you employ animation in the film to add to the atmosphere of the piece?

I used digital interventions to suggest a both a sense of the uncanny in these places and to create temporal disruptions. I wanted to quite literally stretch the skin of the film – stretching time and also stretching the reliability of the image. The manipulations I’ve made to the landscapes are quite subtle. Its about giving the resonant emotion of the events and their traumatic legacy a visual and aural form and it became about communicating something of the emotional and bodily experience at those sites – for the witnesses, for me and for the viewer.

Why did you decide to incorporate the written word into sections of the work?

Each person’s narrative has three voices: their present-day voice where they are mainly telling how they feel now; the voice describing what they witnessed as children which I re-voiced with Polish Roma children; and the voice that is in text form. This last voice-as-text is used in two ways – it allowed me to present a more internalised, spectral and thoughtful voice, but I also used it to pull us as viewers out of our objective engagement with the interviewees – to give some breathing space.

You worked with young Roma people in the UK on the voiceover. What inspired this?

I worked with Roma children and young people in London to re-voice the sections of testimony where the witnesses describe what they had actually seen 70 years ago. I wanted to create a temporal shift – to not only visually place the memory at the exact location, but to also place them there at the age they were when they witnessed. It helps us as viewers too, to understand the impact witnessing these violent events has had on them. As part of the process of making the film we held a public event in London last year where I showed some of the interviews I had recorded. Lots of London-based Roma turned up and participated. It was through this event and their engagement with what I was doing that working with the Roma children became possible. It was important to me that the film wasn’t just about the past – similar things are still happening today across Central Europe – so involving the young people was a way of bringing the conversation into the present.