This film is a short re-seeing of the design and spending flaws of a bureaucratic system. A seemingly lost room below the SUNY Albany campus is imagined as a secret chamber, and its accessibility considered on varied terms.
This "chapter" is part of a feature length non-fiction film that documents a cross-country trip taken by my father, my brother and me in December, 2006 to visit my father's nine living brothers and sisters and my grandmother on the 50th anniversary of their emigration from the Netherlands.
In the full production interviews with my Aunts and Uncles are interspersed with voiced over letters to my unborn children. These letters recount moments on the trip, family relationships and ask questions that I still find unanswerable.
This piece aims at memories, the times held in them, and the loss of those referenced moments. A memory is only associative, it is not a thing of its own. It only exists as a reference to real things. Or sometimes imagined things. Either way memories are not the same as the remembered, except that they slip away just as the past does. So how precious can they be?
This piece was named by my good friend's 5 year old son. And that seems appropriate. Not the name so much as the namer. Who better to read the fleetingness of memories that try to escape before having been cataloged than a child. A little man with few memories and many imaginings.
As he grows he’ll collect more memories, as we all do. But the usefulness of those memories is in question. How can a person at once be engaged in living and remembering their life?
People move through relationships and spaces/places, and sometimes those movements become more important than they seem at the time.
