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The filmmaker’s grandfather, suffering from Alzheimer’s, remembers, obsessively, an episode from his youth: an elegant young woman climbs over the railing of the pier and jumps into the water; he saves her. The old man’s speech becomes more confused; the women of his family repeat the story, now become mythical, using re-speaking techniques inspired by “verbatim theater”; the filmmaker reconstructs the scene, casting a young woman whose blonde chignon brings to mind Vertigo’s Madeleine. Yet the moment comes when the grandfather has to be brought to a nursing home, where, gradually, he fades away. His mind, his breathing, fly away with the passing time, along the flowing water. The last image that stays with him, is that of the pier…
A reflection upon the way we relate to one another as individuals, scratched into 16mm black leader.
One of three sisters becomes lost in the wood where things have no names. Its ephemeral shadow-light filters into the room of the other two, who search for her in their own reflections. It is a tale of sisterhood and the loss of sisterhood, quest and the failure of that quest. Its images are made through a series of long-exposure time-lapses inside a large camera obscura structure, and its text is based on a series of fictionalized real events and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.
After marrying Cindy to get U.S. citizenship, penniless Youssef comes to America, cannot find her, and faces the harsh realities of being homeless in Los Angeles.
