They say you can start over. But if the music in your head sounds different, the smells aren’t the same, and everything that once felt familiar exists only in memory, where exactly does that new beginning start?

That question sits at the heart of Morning Afternoon Night, a new short film from Perth-based filmmaker, Dasha Melnik.

The film follows Marta, a young Russian migrant in Perth, as she faces the end of her visa and confronts a more complicated question than where she will live next: who is she when home is nowhere to be found?

“Every migrant carries two versions of themselves: the person they left behind, and the person they’re trying to become,” Melnik says.

Rather than exploring immigration as a political experience, Morning Afternoon Night examines its quieter emotional and psychological consequences, the feeling of losing one version of yourself while trying to build another.

“It’s about how the past doesn’t stay in the past,” Melnik explains. “It stays in your body, your habits, your language, your silence.”

At its core, the film explores the space between memory and survival, belonging and displacement, and the mother you left behind and the life you’re trying to build.

“It’s a film about not fully belonging anywhere, and learning how to live with that,” Melnik says. “Not by fixing it, but by simply continuing, moment by moment, morning, afternoon, night.”

Originally from Saint Petersburg, Melnik’s work exists somewhere between fever dreams and reality. Her background in journalism continues to influence her cinematic language, with a focus on observation, emotional truth and the complexities of human nature.

She completed a Master of Screen Studies at Edith Cowan University, and her directorial work includes the short documentary Basil VS Basil, which featured at the WA Made Film Festival and CinefestOZ, alongside a growing body of narrative and experimental work developed within Perth’s independent film scene.

With Morning Afternoon Night, Melnik turns a deeply personal experience into a quietly affecting story about migration, identity and the things we carry with us, even when we leave home behind.

“I wanted to portray immigration as a slow detachment from everything that once felt familiar,” she says. “The inability to fully belong anywhere.”

“For me, that’s where the human side of the conversation is important. Marta isn’t a statistic. She’s just a person trying to figure out where her life belongs.”

Interview by Matthew Eeles

You’re originally from Saint Petersburg. Considering the depth of Morning Afternoon Night’s short but powerful narrative, I’m wondering how certain aspects of your own life inspire this film?

I think it would be impossible for me to make a film about immigration and not bring some of my own experience into it. I was born in Saint Petersburg and moved to Australia in 2012, so I know that strange feeling of having one life behind you and another life that you are trying to build in front of you. But Morning Afternoon Night isn’t autobiographical. Marta isn’t me, and the events of the film didn’t happen to me. What comes from my own experience is more emotional than literal, that feeling of being between places, between languages, between versions of yourself. When you move to another country, people often imagine that the hardest part is physically leaving. I think the more complicated part can come much later. You start building a life somewhere else, you adapt, you learn how things work, you make friends, you work, you create a home, but there can still be this question somewhere in the background: Where do I actually belong? For me, that became the emotional starting point for Marta. She’s facing something very practical, the end of her visa, but underneath that is a much bigger question about identity, home and whether you can simply choose where you belong. The film takes place over one day because I liked the idea of compressing that huge existential question into something very ordinary. She wakes up, goes through her day, meets people, and by the end of it she has to confront something that has probably been sitting inside her for much longer.

Your lead actor Anna Martianova was born in Russia and her own story feeds into Marta’s story in so many ways. When did you first meet Anna, and what was it like to develop this character with her?

I first met Anna through our creative circle a couple of years ago, she is a very talented artist, and I became very interested in her because she had something that I felt was right for Marta even before we had really talked about the character. The fact that she was also born in Russia was important, but I didn’t want to simply cast her because of that. I was much more interested in the emotional truth she could bring to the character. We talked quite a lot about the feeling of being somewhere that isn’t quite home and about those little things that can trigger memories of another place, like music, smells, food, language, even the way someone speaks to you. A lot of Marta’s story is actually in what she doesn’t say. So with Anna, we worked a lot on restraint. I didn’t want her to explain what Marta was feeling to the audience. I wanted the audience to discover it through her face, her behaviour and the little moments between the dialogue. Anna brought a lot of herself to that, while still creating a character who is separate from her. That was really special to watch.

How surprised were you by the quality of Anna’s performance considering this is her first acting role?

I’m incredibly proud of her. What’s particularly impressive is that Anna had never acted before, but the film required quite a subtle performance. There isn’t a huge amount of dialogue or a lot of obvious emotional exposition. She had to carry a lot of the film internally. For a first time actor, that’s difficult because you can’t rely on big dramatic moments. You have to be comfortable doing almost nothing and still communicating something. Anna was very instinctive. She listened, she responded, and she wasn’t afraid of silence. Sometimes the most interesting moments happened between the scripted actions, when she would just be existing as Marta. I think that’s one of the reasons the performance feels honest. She wasn’t trying to demonstrate that she was acting. We had fun times at the rehearsals that’s for sure.

Even though you didn’t shoot this film, you have worked as a cinematographer for many short films, as well as a music video for the band Pond. There’s a line in the film from Mark, “The light is different here”, which we hear from so many international filmmakers who have made films in Perth and Western Australia. How much fun was it for you and your cinematographer Liang Xu to play with light throughout the shoot?

That was one of my favourite parts of making the film. Because I am a cinematographer myself, it was actually quite interesting for me to step back and not operate the camera. It meant I could concentrate much more on the overall visual language of the film and work very closely with Liang. Western Australia gives you so much to work with. The light really is different here. We’ve been trying to make light look European. Here it can be incredibly harsh and bright during the day, but then you get these very specific transitional moments in the morning and afternoon where everything changes incredibly quickly. The night scenes were particularly fun because we weren’t trying to make Perth look like somewhere else. We wanted to embrace the fact that this is Western Australia. The Ferris Wheel lights, the moon, the darkness around them, all of those things became part of the visual storytelling. I also really enjoyed working with Liang, he has his own visual instincts, and that made it a collaboration rather than me simply directing someone to reproduce what I would have done myself.

I mentioned the character Mark, who is played by the film’s co-producer and editor, Mark Zanosov. Was Mark always going to play this character, and what was it like to work with Mark overall?

Yes, Mark was always very much in my mind for the character. The interesting thing is that Mark was involved with the film in so many different capacities. He was a producer, he played Mark, and he edited the film, so we were basically living with this project together from the beginning through to post-production. I think the character benefited from that because I wasn’t looking for someone to perform a completely constructed version of this person. There are aspects of Mark’s natural personality that I liked for the character, and I wanted to keep some of that. Working together can obviously be challenging when you’re wearing so many different hats, because you’re constantly switching between creative decisions, practical production problems and then suddenly having to think about performance or editing. But I think that’s also what made the film possible. We were able to make decisions very quickly and trust each other. There was a lot of discussion, but there was also a lot of instinct. And having Mark edit the film meant that we could really shape the rhythm of the story together after the shoot. That was especially important for such a short film, because every second matters.

Can you talk us through the tattoo scene and how you pulled this off. Were there many challenges to that?

The tattoo scene was definitely one of those moments where something that looks very simple on screen becomes surprisingly complicated to execute. It’s a real tattoo! The main challenge was making it feel completely natural within the scene. We didn’t want the tattoo to look like a filmmaking trick or draw attention to the fact that we were creating it for the film. It had to feel like something Marta would genuinely have. It was one of those little details that required much more planning than you might expect, but I love those details because they help build the character without having to explain anything verbally. For me, the tattoo isn’t really there just as decoration. It’s another little piece of Marta’s history, something that suggests there is a whole life behind this person that we only get to see a small part of. In real life Anna was a tattoo artist in Russia and still does tattoos here sometimes.

I’m not implying that the film has a political subtext whatsoever, because it really doesn’t, and I don’t expect you to get too personal here, but there’s a lot of unrest around the world at the moment when it comes to immigration, especially in Australia which coincides with the rise of far right voices online. What are your opinions on the political landscape in Australia at the moment in regards to the potential future of immigration in Australia?

I think immigration is one of those subjects where it is very easy to reduce an incredibly complicated human experience into numbers, policies and political arguments. I’ve lived in Australia for many years, and I’m also an immigrant, so I obviously have a personal relationship with the subject. But I don’t think Morning Afternoon Night was made as a political statement about Australian immigration policy. It was much more interested in what immigration feels like from the inside. At the same time, I think it is impossible to completely separate people’s personal experiences from the political environment around them. Visa rules, immigration policies and public attitudes aren’t abstract things when you’re the person whose future depends on them. What concerns me is when immigrants become an easy political category rather than being seen as individuals. People move for completely different reasons, like work, family, safety, education, love, opportunity and every person’s story is different. I also think Australia has always been shaped by immigration, and that reality shouldn’t be forgotten when we talk about who is supposedly entitled to belong here. You can have a serious conversation about how immigration should work, what infrastructure Australia needs, what the limits should be, or how the system should be managed without turning immigrants themselves into a problem. For me, that’s where the human side of the conversation is important. Marta isn’t a statistic. She’s just a person trying to figure out where her life belongs.

As mentioned at the beginning, you’re originally from Saint Petersburg. Do you now feel a sense of belonging in Australia after so many years, or do you still feel an emotional split between the two?

I think I belong to both and neither, which is probably the most honest answer. Saint Petersburg will always be part of me. It is where my memories begin, where my cultural references come from, where my childhood happened. You don’t really lose that because you move somewhere else. But Australia is also where I have built my adult life. I’ve worked here, studied here, made films here, made friendships here and raised my family here. So Australia isn’t simply the place I moved to. It became a huge part of who I am. I don’t think belonging necessarily means choosing one place and rejecting another. There are things about Russia that I miss deeply, and there are things about Australia that I could never imagine giving up. Sometimes that creates a strange feeling of being permanently in between. But maybe that is also why I was interested in making this film. I don’t think Marta’s question is necessarily, “Which country is my home?” It’s more complicated than that. Maybe home can be something you carry with you rather than somewhere you eventually arrive.

Could you see yourself eventually developing Morning Afternoon Night into a feature film, or are you ready to move on from it now?

I think there is definitely a larger story hiding inside Morning Afternoon Night, but I’m not sure I want to turn this particular story into a feature. The short works because it is a very concentrated moment in Marta’s life. I like that we only spend one day with her and that there are things about her that remain unanswered. But the world and the character could absolutely be explored further. If I ever developed it into a feature, I think I would want to move beyond simply expanding the short. I’d want to explore one of the most real and personal parts of Morning Afternoon Night, which is the story of the mother. The phone calls and the messages she leaves for her daughter are very closely based on my own experience. My mother died a couple of years ago, and the voice messages she left me are one of the very few things I have left from her. So that part of the film is probably the closest I came to putting something directly from my own life into the story. As part of her mother’s final wishes, let’s say “Marta” promises to take her ashes and scatter them over the Southern Ocean. What follows is almost my odyssey between two countries, part road movie, part travel story, but also a very intimate story about grief, art, family, immigration and the complicated relationship between where you come from and where you have built your life. I’m also someone who gets very excited about the next project. Once I finish something, I usually want to take what I’ve learned from it and put it into something completely different. At the moment, though, I’m happy to let the short exist as its own thing. So I wouldn’t say I’ve moved on emotionally, but creatively I’m already looking forward to the next story.

Morning Afternoon Night will screen at CinefestOZ on Friday, 4 September. Details here.

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