Becoming Outline

Without allowing the most personal aspects to devolve into narcissistic introspection, Becoming Outline develops a cinematic form that reflects on class, nation and gender as fundamental dimensions of lived experience, socialization and self-constitution. Starting from an autobiographical art project, Miriam Bajtala reconstructs her life through the floor plans of the eighteen apartments she has lived in. These spaces become a kind of spatial biography — a “curriculum vitae” shaped by migration, economic disadvantage and patriarchal structures. Moving between film, performance and installation, the work combines reenactments, voice-over and staged compositions. Fiction and documentary, distance and intimacy, analysis and affect intertwine, dissolving the boundaries between private memory and public discourse. Rather than constructing a linear narrative, Becoming Outline unfolds as a fragmented process of self-examination. The recurring spaces — apartments, landscapes, transitional zones — become sites where personal history and structural conditions intersect. Questions of belonging, migration and self-empowerment are explored not as fixed categories, but as evolving and contradictory experiences. Through this layered approach, the film creates a reflective framework in which identity is understood as something formed through movement, memory and social context. The result is a hybrid, autoethnographic work that transforms individual experience into a broader inquiry into the conditions that shape a life. Becoming Outline premiered at the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival 2024 and was subsequently screened at festivals including the Diagonale – Festival of Austrian Film 2025