What do you do when a close friend disappears out of your life? This is a dilemma that filmmaker Christine Saab wrestles with in her short film In The Space You Left, which received its premiere in UK competition at Sheffield Doc Fest this week.
Saab, who made the doc as her graduation project at the UK’s National Film School, is half Japanese. As a kid, she spent summers in Japan. She briefly studied there – and that is how she met the friend (whose name she asks not to be printed). Now, though, that friend is beyond reach.
In the film, which she shot during lockdown, Saab is shown sitting at her computer, trying to contact the person. She discovers that she is far from the only one searching online for a lost acquaintance. In Japan in particular, there are many others looking for loved ones: relatives, friends or associates who’ve become part of “the disappeared.”
It is impossible not to speculate about what might have become of them. There are certain areas of Japan where people travel to in order to go “off grid.” They can wipe clear their digital trail and survive with cash-in-hand jobs. Saab was fascinated by this idea but also wary about the way it was being spun, and possibly exaggerated, by the media.
“I did find it a massive source of support,” the director says of the online community of people looking for lost friends. “It was a relief that there were other people in a similar position….and I think I was really just fascinated by it.”
The notes that were being posted by those in search of their missing contacts felt to her as if they were internet equivalents of messages in bottles. “I don’t think most people thought this forum would really help,” she says of the unlikelihood that the notes would ever reach the people for whom they were intended.
Nonetheless, the very act of trying to make contact was therapeutic for many.
Saab questioned whether posting messages was “the right thing to do.” There was a sense that many of those looking for their old friends were struggling in their own present day lives and therefore were reaching back into the past.
The director had been close to making a completely different film as her graduation project. She had been planning to fly to California to follow a mother and her daughter, a talented figure skater. Covid put this plan on hold. “The first thing we were told is that we were not allowed to fly anywhere,” Saab remembers the message from the tutors. Then, the next piece of bad news was that the documentary students were “not allowed to meet anyone.” This meant they had to think about their films in a very different way.
Saab felt her film was tapping into changing feelings about connection, distance and technology that became increasingly commonplace during the pandemic. Stuck at home, many others around the world couldn’t help but wonder about friends whom they could no longer need. Thanks to social media, you can contact almost anyone anywhere, instantly – but only if they want to be contacted.
The missing friend was “part of life I used to have.” Her failure to reach him has made her think of earlier times when, if you didn’t have the address and phone number of acquaintances abroad, there would be no way of reaching them. “I hope the film expresses that…I wouldn’t say, generational gap, but it is so different the way we see the world. Because of technology, the world feels so much closer together – but it is not always the case.”
Saab’s initial idea was to make the film “purely a desktop documentary.” She wanted it to be filmed “just through the screen.” However her editor Cecilia De Lena advised here to set up a camera anyway and to film herself. “That’ll give us options,” the editor suggested.
Does Saab still think of her missing friend? “I had been looking for answers long before I started making this film,” she reflects. “I think the film is quite accurate in terms of my own journey which is coming to terms with someone who has decided to disappear…just because you can look for someone with help of technology and the internet, it doesn’t always mean you should.”
There is still also the nagging feeling that something might have happened to the friend. Sometimes, though, it makes more sense to leave the past behind. “It [making the film] has helped me process that a little bit,” Saab says. She adds, though, that she “definitely” feels “hurt” over the loss of the friend. “It was a very important time of my life…to have that disappear with no answers was a very difficult thing.”
What would she say if she bumped into him by chance tomorrow?
“I would just like to see how he is…”
