Murmurations is a short documentary created by artists Tanya Hartman and Brian Hawkins. Through interviews and impressionistic images, the film explores the intricacies, intimacies beauties and losses in the lives of refugee and migrant teenaged students enrolled in the English as a Second/Other Language program at Wichita East High School in Wichita, Kansas. The film also delves into the lives of the caregivers, family members and friends of the students upon whom we focus, as well as the texture and environment of Wichita, a city precariously balanced between poverty and progress.
The intimate glimpses into complex lives presented in the film came about over eight months of immersive filming; living in Wichita for weeks at a time, attending classes with the kids, eating meals with families and being available to talk, laugh, commiserate and listen.
There exists a claustrophobic disjunction between vast inner lives and limited language. This creates a lyrical cadence that runs through the film, as words and phrases are cobbled together in unexpected and beautiful ways, in order to express longing, courage and fear. This documentary is a poem to our subjects’ beauty and inventiveness, a ballad of longing for home and hope for the future.