Born in London in 1970, the filmmaker has sought, since her early works, to make ostensibly confined social issues tangible as personal experiences—not from the perspective of someone directly affected, but as a seemingly detached observer who does not proceed analytically but rather brings these experiences into dialogue with her own biography. At the same time that the narrator reflects on her own perceptions in the voice-overs of her films, the camera distorts the forms, colours, and speeds, thereby personalising them.

Laura Waddington studied literature at Cambridge University before moving to New York in the early 1990s. Already, in her first short film, The Visitor, which she made there at the age of twenty-two, a man is observed, examined, and judged from a distance based merely on the objects scattered around his hotel room, that the chambermaid rummages through and photographs. In Zone, the observing subject is the filmmaker herself, who travels on a cruise ship with a hidden camera. Here, too, the voice-over sets the tone, a reflection on longing and loss. The motif of the journey as a search for identity runs like a thread through all of Waddington’s works. The destinations are unknown and unimportant; what matters is the experience itself. These experiences are not passively undertaken; rather, the filmmaker participates in the stories and the lives of those she films.

This is also the case in Cargo, where she travels from Venice to the Middle East on a container ship, spending a few weeks as the only woman among sailors, some of whom have spent several years at sea without extended shore leave. Here, too, Waddington has distilled a few moments from the journey, stretching them to the point where they nearly reach stillness, becoming like photographs; here, again, the voice-over reflects on the bitterness of others’ lives, in the face of which one’s own worries increasingly fade away. There are only a few brief statements; often the sound cuts out entirely, directing even more attention to the visuals, or the images are underscored by the magnificent minimalist music of Simon Fisher Turner, known for his soundtrack for Derek Jarman’s Blue.

Laura Waddington aims to make dreamlike films, not journalistic ones, countering typical media portrayals—for example, of illegal migration—with her own perspective, which comes to gradually align with the viewpoint of those affected. This merging of external and personal perspectives is something that she carries especially far in The Lost Days. For this project, she contacted people in fifteen countries … and asked them to film their hometowns. From the resulting footage—of Jaffa, Lisbon, Marrakesh, Paris, Sarajevo, Taipei, and more—she created a fictional travel diary that documents the impressions of a woman who is drawn to each new city, discovering it, and in the process grows increasingly alienated from her own home. By filming the footage directly off a television screen and distorting it to the point that cities blend together and the images become abstract forms, Waddington reflects the shifting mindset of the traveller: personal memories increasingly overshadow the actual experience, until, in the end, the decision to return home is made. The captivating beauty of the visual compositions in Waddington’s films, accompanied by Fisher Turner’s hypnotic music, is fascinating. Yet it is a beauty that emerges only from a deep intellectual and emotional engagement with the filmed material. Regarding reality, as people typically encounter it, the voice-over in The Lost Days expresses a clear stance, revealing that Waddington is not solely concerned with social critique but fundamentally with reflection and perception itself: “Too much beauty, impossible to film.”