This short documentary is a piece of a conversation between me and my father. The B roll comes from my personal camera roll. I didn’t initially intend to use it until I was sitting there editing the footage of my father telling me a story.
My family is very prone to telling stories. It’s either that or we talk about media. I always feel like I don’t know nearly enough about my dad despite living in his home for the better part of 19 years of my life. I know he’s adverse to being recorded, so I deeply appreciated him letting me film him. He had been telling me some story from his own childhood about hunting with his dad. I can’t remember what prompted it beyond him recently inheriting one of his father’s hunting guns since his father doesn’t have much of a use for it anymore.
While I was rewatching this story trying to pick what I wanted to keep in 3 minutes, I had started recalling some of the various moments I’ve recorded in the past two years. Since these were the visuals that the story evoked for me, I felt I would let the audience into my mind and memory a little bit. There were a range of other things I could have added, but what I put in feels sufficient.
This work is a mix of performative and participatory mode documentary. The participatory nature is the relationship between me and my father. It’s not evident but that relationship is what opens him up beyond a fairly quiet accountant into a man who cares a lot for his family; a man who talk about films and their plots; a man who loves to tell stories. He’s a big reason why I love telling stories and hearing them. Sometimes it doesn’t occur to me that not everyone likes telling stories to connect with people. The part of this documentary that turns performative is where I begin interjecting with B roll from my own life. Moments where I was in the sleeping bag in the back of a car or times where I shot a gun off the bed of a truck. There are connection points to memories I will never have, so I fill in with the memories that I do.
It’s not a story that says something about some bigger social thing, more than a moment shared between people. This film is as interpersonal as Shermans March, despite lacking the same runtime. It’s about seeing people in their own place—This doc was shot in the family room of the house I grew up in. It’s about how people connect with their own stories as they listen and what kind of relationship is conducive to hearing the stories you couldn’t tell a game warden. It’s the relationship between me and my father. It’s how I mentally connect my life to his as I mourn the fact that there was no chance I could have lived that specific, rich experience with him.