"5930" is a short film directed by Athená Polymenis concerning the relationship she had with a particular family home. The film was created for a Radio-Television-Film course, Cinemalab, which is the brain child of professor and cinematographer Deborah Lewis. The prompt was to write a love letter to a specific place or person, which led Polymenis to define her attachment to the family home.
The footage was from an old bank of footage Polymenis captured of the home, mainly the art studio, when she had plans to make a documentary of her late grandfather Jim Andrews and his extraordinary life and his hobbies as an artist. Polymenis notes that the house, the property as a whole, was exceptionally serene and that many would come visit the home - and the tenets Jim and Ursula Andrews - to as an artistic enclave of healing.
"It was a really special home," Polymenis describes, "to me for many reasons - I have always had this artists bone in my body and I never quite knew where it came from and I've just recently discovered from where it did because of this house." Polymenis highlights that she never really knew her Grandfather Andrews and for most of her childhood the studio was a closed door she wasn't to open. It wasn't until the selling of the home that she finally explored the closed off space.
The Studio featured many spaces and interesting features including a lead room and what you see here: a darkroom.
Since Andrews was a stained glass window maker, the studio included a wall containing over 600 sheets of glass, most of which were hand poured and imported from Germany. After his passing and the selling of the home - these sheets of glass were donated to a local stained glass window maker in Texas.
"It was a treasure trove of all of his artistic endeavors, so cleanly laid out and untouched since the onset of his Multiple Sclerosis," Polymenis says.
Polymenis comments that the longer documentary she had planned was inspired by her late grandfather as it explores what experiences artists have when they're own body stops allowing them to create. "Anyways, when I saw the prompt I knew that this needed to be my love letter. A letter to something I didn't know and something that will never know how much I wish to know it," Polymenis says. The film employs a more abstract editing style, when combined with the narration can illicit any number of meanings - something Polymenis enjoys incorporating into some of her work.
