Embers

A filmmaker searches for a picture of the Self, formed through words, lives and memories of other people, other beings, redwood trees. Woven between India and Northern California, the film examines the subjectivity of memory and loss, both of family and of soil. Death, loss and grief find meaning in this work only when looked at from far away, in a new, unknown soil. A collective self, spanning generations, now replaced by an individual at the centre, a mark of this new soil. It uses the autobiographical as a runway for confronting the Self of our present, and memory is its vehicle. A minor epileptic condition that creates physical holes in my memory, a way to examine this Self. This film is indebted to painting, and attempts to translate the traditions of self-portraiture and Impressionism into cinema. An homage to an ancestral knowledge that continues to exist, despite us, deep inside the soil of two lands separated by water.