Fly Away Home: An interpretation

Priyadershini Deivakumar recreates scenes from the Austrian film Fly Away Home, and takes us through her process.

2 min read

The inspiration for this artwork comes from the Austrian movie Fly Away Home. This movie takes place in Vienna, with World War II coming to an end. The film starts with Christine, a fearless child, finding some Christmas decorations in a rubble of concrete, after a bomb blast. She picks up something from the pile and looks through it. At that moment, I felt the director telling me that this movie was going to be in Christine’s perspective. Therefore, the focus of my artwork is the Christmas decoration.

Creative process

I used micropens, Chinese ink and markers. The details were drawn with micro pens. Colors were added with markers. Some shades and texture was painted on with Chinese ink. All these were done by hand. After scanning the artwork and looking at it on a computer screen, I decided to make it monochromatic, to give it more of a ‘war’ vibe.

This illustration consists of seven scenes from the movie, all of which I enjoyed watching and they continue to make me smile. One of the scenes, the drawing in the centre, is of Christine clinging to the gate of her house, wearing a dress, a red coat and a pair of shoes, which her mother forced her to wear.

Read an interview with Mirjam Unger and Sandra Bohle, the director and writer of Fly Away Home, here.

Special thanks to Shirlene Noordin for helping Priya to catch a screening of Fly Away Home at the EUFF 2018 in Singapore.


About the artist

In school, Priyadershini Deivakumar could not pay attention to the teacher, she drew instead. She chose to study art in secondary school, and has been on a journey of discovery ever since. She is currently a student of Fine Arts at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore. She aspires to be an artist.

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