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Fields Fallen from Distant Songs is an experimental film loosely inspired by the filmmaker’s great-grandparents’ history as Japanese immigrant laborers on Hawaiian sugarcane plantations. The film contends with contemporary questions of sovereignty, solidarity, and hauntings of the past as they persist in the present. A cross-temporal narrative unfolds as ghostly images flicker across the screen: found footage of workers on the plantations intersperse with Japanese folk songs, poetry, 16mm home movies shot by her grandfather in the 1960s, and the artist’s own footage of the eruption of Kīlauea in January 2023. The material, economic, and cultural connotations of sugar are inextricable from histories of migration and displacement, but Jeffereis attempts to reframe this narrative by exploring notions of rematriation, of returning ancestral land.
This film screens as part of the shorts program Your Home Is no Home.
2705 SW 3rd Street, Miami, FL 33135
Maya Jeffereis is an artist and filmmaker whose work in video, performance, and installation seeks to expand upon overlooked histories and fill in archival gaps with counter narratives, personal histories, and speculative fictions. Jeffereis’ work has been presented in the United States and internationally. She teaches art, art history, and Asian American Studies at Parsons School of Design at The New School and Hunter College (CUNY). She earned an MFA from Hunter College and BA and BFA from the University of Washington.
