Bye For Now, 2018-2020
documentary short, 35 minutes
Bye For Now, is an elegiac new film that offers a meditation on loss, mortality, and location, using water as a metaphor for the variable flow of time and memory. Filmed in Venice, Italy this deeply personal work is an attempt to directly communicate with the dead and to share the experience of a beloved and evocative place with a loved one who is now gone.
Composed of meditative passages juxtaposed with quick, rhythmic cuts, the film evokes a mysterious and ghostly maritime city, imbued with a combination of beauty and decay. Throughout the film, images and sounds of life in the city – the swirling green lagoon, the variable Venetian light, the whir of passing boats – are experienced, marking time as the days progress. Bye For Now is a meditative requiem, using landscapes, natural and manmade, as a conveyor of loss and a repository of deep emotion.
Bye For Now is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.
Written, directed and shot by Shaun Irons
Editing: Shaun Irons and Lauren Petty