Family History

The filmmaker rushes to build his sandcastle. As the shoreline encroaches, the sandy ramparts defiantly fill the frame. The granules shift, revealing an old man floating amidst the sea of stories. As a background, the moon rises to find its eclipse, carrying with it the tide.

"Family History" is an audio-visual representation of living legacy, based on my discovery of a cassette tape of my great-grandfather's narration of the family tree. True to my own experience of trying to divine my own place within my family's somewhat cryptically conveyed traditional expectations, the one-hour tape that he made was blank for 55 minutes until the end approached and he finally turned on the microphone. Of course by then, the batteries on his ancient machine were dying, and the audio image slipped into chaos, becoming as impenetrable to me as the content of the story itself.