ROLES: director, writer, editor

A young non-binary person working in the photographic darkroom must reconcile with their shadows while healing from trauma.

Director: Matthew/Moth Hutton

Cast: Billie Deganutti, Jas Standley, Paton Smith, Robin Bowen, Ray Hodder

In 2023 I conducted some work in the photographic darkroom, and was fascinated by this place as a spiritual vault. This chamber where we come to work with light and shadow. The water, the silver gelatin of the film and paper; the connections of water and silver with emotion, the subconscious, the moon — and the moon’s links to cyclical phases, just as darkroom processing moves through cyclical phases, repetitions... This glorious behemoth of entangled imageries. Particularly as someone whose photographic work is animated by a desire to honour the light which falls, this liminal vault is somewhere I wanted to wander deeper.

In Safelight, modes of analogue photographic image processing and developing are united with modes of trauma image processing (the EMDR practised with the therapist), as our central character, Illume, tries to navigate and renegotiate their relationship with self.

The script was written with the intent of casting non-binary and trans actors as all key characters, providing space for non-cisgender people to not have to play cisgender roles — not so much carving out space, as deliberately building a space.

Safelight is a story of healing from trauma where the focus is on processes of healing and the reclamation of self. Healing can be complicated — we need tangible options for how we could heal on personal and societal levels. In order to claim substantial change personally and societally, we need to envisage how this change could manifest. Identifying what’s “wrong” is a start, but is useless without asking “if not this, then what?”

With all the layers of symbologies it is not necessarily immediately clear what is occurring in Safelight. The multiple facets resolve themselves like trauma. Sit with it, think about it, rewind, pause, consider. The answers are there. Some are clearly self-evident. Some lie waiting to be discovered. Some will only reveal themselves months later, with the realisation it was there all along. Complex perhaps, but not actually that complicated.