“It’s too cold for the spirits to live here”

Artistic Research Week 2025 | Master of Film | Part of the Keep an Eye Filmacademie Festival

On October 16th, 1958, a family fled Indonesia. They spent a month at sea aboard the M.S. Sibajak on a voyage to The Netherlands. When they arrived, it was getting winter. Coming from the tropics, the cold was a shock. The family quickly noticed that the spirits who had always been with them in Indonesia were no longer there - they had left them along the journey.

In the ‘work-in-progress' cut of the film, the M.S. Sibajak is reimagined as both a portal and a vessel that sails, not only across oceans, but through time itself - where past, present, and future collapse into one another. Within this space, the lingering presence of the spirits haunts the peripheries. The search for spirits becomes a methodological approach to illuminate complexities of colonial family history that had long remained hidden, literally stowed away in biscuit tins in the attic. By unveiling the family archive, the stories of the ancestors become tangible again. Schift interweaves the archival materials with footage from her recent journey to Indonesia, creating a layered narrative that bridges personal experience with historical displacement.