2026
The film begins with intimate Super 8 scenes of my parents and my sister inhabiting the rancho before I existed, moments of leisure, care, and suspended time. These images transition into a contemporary moonrise filmed decades later, where my father, now older and partially blind due to an accident that occurred in that same place, recounts the story of how he lost his eye. In a single uninterrupted shot, immediately after finishing the factual account, he is invited to retell the event differently, not as it happened, but as he wishes it had happened. He then invents a romanticized pirate narrative, transforming trauma into myth. The work unfolds between these two versions: testimony and fiction, memory and performance, inherited archive and present-day reenactment.
Rather than seeking a definitive truth, the piece explores how personal histories are constantly rewritten through storytelling, desire, and imagination. The rancho becomes both a physical territory and a psychological landscape where family memory, environmental change, and narrative invention converge.
Through the dialogue between past and present footage, truth reflects on authorship across generations: my parents’ gaze behind the Super 8 camera meets my own lens decades later, questioning who constructs history and how stories survive through image-making.
Video Stills