The phrase mtrjm fasl alany — “translated season – now” — insists on a double labor. First, translation as carrying across : from the language of normal summers (chlorine, fireworks, flip-flops) into the language of pandemic summers (six feet, PCR tests, case curves). Second, translation as interpretation in the moment , without the luxury of hindsight. We did not know, in June 2020, whether this would be the strangest summer of our lives or the new permanent climate. We were translating a season as it happened, a simultaneous interpretation where the speaker kept changing the script.
So here is the essay, not in words but in the act of filming: The comma is the pause between breaths. The summer is the subject that refuses to conjugate properly. And mtrjm fasl alany is the subtitle that reminds us — every season arrives as a foreign language, and we are all amateur translators, holding our phones up to the world, asking it to please make sense. i--- fylm My First Summer 2020 mtrjm fasl alany
To film this summer is to admit that the medium itself is inadequate. Film craves movement — the dolly shot, the pan across a crowded beach, the close-up of sweat on a lover’s brow. But my first summer of 2020 offered only static frames: a laptop on a kitchen table, a hand washing groceries in the sink, a window through which the world looked like a postcard from an extinct civilization. And yet, I filmed. I filmed the way light changed across my bedroom wall from 7 AM to 7 PM. I filmed my mother’s hands kneading bread — an act so ancient it felt like rebellion against the newness of the virus. I filmed the feral cat that adopted our porch, because at least something moved without permission. The phrase mtrjm fasl alany — “translated season