Artist in Conversation: Sadia Pineda Hameed

As part of the programme, which brought artists into the space to work with the archive, we asked: what was the thinking behind the title Anak: Where Did We Stay?

Sadia: "The title is taken from a home movie from The Box’s archive, Perranporth Where Did We Stay?, and anak is Tagalog (a language spoken in the Phillipines) for ‘child’. The question felt tender and nostalgic in the context of rewatching a home movie together, as my film becomes a conversation between my mother and I as we shared stories of our travels. I was interested in how the title could hold the notion of shared memories and histories between generations, and the similarities and repetitions in the journeys we take."

Anak: Where Did We Stay? is a moving-image work that draws on The Box film archive. What led you to these materials, and what did you discover through working with them?

Sadia: "I love making films using hi8 camcorders as they’re able to capture spontaneous and unrehearsed moments in a way that less handheld cameras cannot. The filmmaking, for me, then comes in the process of editing what, at face value, could be considered holiday footage. There’s a playful autonomy in being able to construct or resist a narrative this way.

I was then drawn to The Box’s archive because of the substantial home movie collection they hold. These archives are often overlooked for not having historical value but, for me, they are rare, first-hand accounts of place, people and time periods documented through a non-institutional lens.

As I worked with them alongside my own footage, I began to regard the home movie as this radical form of building one’s own archive outside of institutional ideas of knowledge. When I showed my friend and artist Farah Allibhai my parents’ home movies of multicultural festivals they attended in the 80s, she posed the idea of this documentation being a kind of unconscious activism - and that’s really stayed with me."

How did engaging with archival footage including your own materials influence the narrative and emotional tone of the final work?

Sadia: "I began with over 100 hours of footage from The Box’s archive, my personal archive and my parents archive. To avoid being overwhelmed, I selected moments intuitively, paralleling footage with one another. A narrative began to emerge; of arrival, homemaking and survival through community and joy. This was underscored by the chance discovery of footage taken by my father of a family friend performing the song Anak - the lyrics of which speak to all those themes.

However, during the editing process, the film still felt un-contextualised. It was during a conversation with The Box's Media Archivist, Stacey Anderson and Reimagining the Film Archive Discovery Media Assistant, Zahra Khanum, that I thought about how home movies from both The Box’s collection and my personal or family collection felt like they were missing voices: those narrating in-person over their holiday films, on the living room TV to family or friends - the only time home movies tend to ever be ‘screened’.

I then decided to show the film to my mother in her living room and record our conversation during this, which became the narration you hear in Anak Where Did We Stay?. The reactive, casual and intimate dialogue, the way we each point out context for one another, ask questions, interrupt, laugh, all carry the emotional tone of the work."

What creative and ethical considerations shaped your approach to recontextualising archival material within a contemporary digital artwork?

Sadia: "Researcher Tania Nana’s BFI Toolkit ‘Exploring the Film Archives at The Box’ was a brilliant resource for how to explore the archives through a decolonial lens with ethical considerations. For example, the artwork touches on racism in the 70s in the UK, and so I searched for archival footage of a student protest against Enoch Powell who came to speak at Exeter University. I had to consider the triggering nature of this footage, but also ways to recontextualise this as an image of resistance without losing the historical context of Powell as a figure who incited discriminatory violence.

In my film, I focus on the student disruption instead, which includes one student banging on a large drum to drown out Powell’s speech. My family’s archival footage appears alongside this, of multicultural dance at UK festivals during the 1980s, where the music and percussion (such as beating bamboo sticks in a Filipino dance, Tinikling) join the student’s drumming in solidarity, community and resistance."

What conversations do you hope Anak: Where Did We Stay? will open up for audiences encountering archival film and the histories you present?

Sadia: "I hope my film encourages audiences to look back at their own home movies as documents of history, and have conversations about how these might be just as valuable, if not more valuable, than institutional archives. In that sense, I hope some audiences even begin to consider themselves archivists, with the power to capture personal and global histories in complicated and intimate ways with total ownership over their narrative."

How does Anak: Where Did We Stay? reflect your current thinking and development as an artist? In what ways does it connect to the wider themes explored in Journeys of Mai?

Sadia: "Anak: Where Did We Stay? reflects my increasing interest in how fictionalisation and dramatisation can often lead us to find the means for telling difficult stories. History as we know it is often already distorted by institutional bias and colonial acquisition when, for many of us, history is oral, generational, colloquial, sometimes mythic. As an artist, working on this film has brought me closer to understanding how working with archives through play and intuition can unlock stories we might not otherwise have access to.

This connects to Journeys of Mai as Sir Joshua Reynlolds’ portrait complicates who the representation of Mai. The portrait presents Mai as a regal yet exoticised figure, and so questions arise around the subject’s autonomy and his own untold story. There are also parallels that can be drawn here between Mai’s experience of his journey from the Pacific Islands to the UK and my mothers’ from the Philippine Islands to the UK. Whilst in different eras and contexts, their experiences of colonisation, othering and belonging were present but not institutionally recorded. Through my film, I explore how revisiting - and to an extent, playfully mythologising - these journeys might speak these unrecorded experiences into the archive."

Watch the film

Anak: Where Did We Stay is on display in the Media Lab gallery at The Box until 14 June 2026. Opening hours are 10am–5pm, Tuesday to Sunday, and on Bank Holiday Mondays.

Reimagining the Film Archive (2023–2026)

This was a three-year programme made possible with support from the National Lottery and the BFI Screen Heritage Fund. Designed as a transformative initiative, it supported digital commissions, workforce development, participatory volunteering, and research projects that deepened engagement with the collections. The programme strengthened the archive’s resilience and sustainability by increasing diversity and representation, while also reducing the carbon footprint of caring for and managing moving image collections.

Explore the full Reimagining the Film Archive programme on our website.