In case you were wondering what students do during lockdown abroad…

Marta Rutkowska is an Aberystwyth University student studying Film and Television Studies with Spanish. She was participating in an Erasmus programme placement at the Universidad San Jorge, in Zaragoza, Spain when COVID-19 forced the country into lockdown in March 2020. While most of our students abroad returned home, Marta chose to remain in Zaragoza and continued her classes online. Below is her explanation of her film ‘Rebobinar’, made during this unusual exchange experience!

This film was made for one of my classes here in Spain. The idea was to create a piece about the topic “isolation”. The translation of the title into English would be “Rewind”. I hope you will enjoy it and think of what actually has happened there because I leave it open to interpretation.

During the lockdown, I tried to stay creative not only to help with working on my current filmmaking studies, but also just to let myself explore the ideas and pursue some of them with the limited resources that I have now. It was a way of letting myself face some struggles throughout making these projects and accepting the imperfections in them. It made me realize how I missed letting myself doing the things I purely enjoy while simply accepting the growth they built in me through the process of creating. I stopped judging myself at that point and started enjoying the way of doing things rather than the final result.

In the end, these thoughts made me free from the negativity that was knocking on my door once in a while. I find it fascinating and I would recommend others to try it too. The process of releasing your thoughts, your struggles, or maybe simply your frustration of boredom, in a creative way that may seem at first “not good enough”. But in the end it is not the result that matters the most. The most important thing is what you’ve achieved while making it, learning about yourself.

Thank you to Marta for letting us share her film.