Film review: Sisters: Dream & Variations is so much more than a documentary at 2021 R2R Film Fest
The art film travels to Iceland with creative sisters Tyr Jami and Jasa Baka
Ingibjorg Johnson, Tyr Jami and Jasa Baka’s late great-grandmother, was always singing. Photo from Sisters: Dream & Variations by Catherine Legault
Sisters: Dream & Variations plays at the Reel 2 Real International Film Festival for Youth, taking place online to April 23.
SISTERS: DREAM & VARIATIONS is classified as a documentary, but it’s so much more than that. The compelling film about artist-sisters Tyr Jami and Jasa Baka is an art film, concert film, travelogue, and family portrait that at times seems like a moving collage, with playful drawings and animation overlapping archival images of the siblings’ late great-grandmother singing.
Ingibjorg Johnson was always singing, and years after her passing, she remains a vital force in the women’s lives—an inspiration and also, in Jami’s case, a musical collaborator.
Sisters, written and directed by Catherine Legault, profiles the siblings for whom art is a way of life. Both of their parents are artists, and their upbringing was steeped in making and creating. Baka, who also goes by Zuzu Knew, is a visual and installation artist who’s completing her Master’s of Fine Art in Reykjavik; Jami is a classically trained cellist and singer-songwriter who founded the band Syngja (“to sing” in Icelandic) and co-leads a music school in Montreal.
The film journeys with the sisters to Iceland, where they had a month-long art residency in 2017. There, they embarked on a project involving their mom, conceptual visual and intermedia artist Debora Alanna. The otherworldly scene of these three performing a local folk legend in front of the Dynjandi waterfall in the North Fjords amid its starkly stunning surroundings under a blindingly sunny sky—each in one of Baka’s fantastical costumes, Alanna’s as bright white as ice for her role as Mountain Queen—is unforgettable.
Throughout the film, we get to hear Johnson singing (and talking about how much she loves singing as well as how much she loves Iceland) through old cassette recordings that Jami continues to pull from in her musical compositions to this day. Johnson, who seemed to be a remarkable character in her lifetime, is a strong character in the film, a subject we wish we could get to know more.
Sisters gives a glimpse into a family life that people may or may not be able to relate to but that nonetheless inspires; art is the women’s life force. Through it, they have forged their own identities and found meaning and purpose. You can only assume that for these two, there’s never a dull moment—which is certainly the case with this artistic film.
Debora Alanna (left) and Jasa Baka in Sisters: Dream & Variations. Photo by Catherine Legault
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