A still from After Paradise
Can you describe your encounter with old analog media that inspired much of your cinematography? I came across the transparencies over six years ago in my grandfather’s closet. He had passed away in 2000, but left an archive of relics in his work den - among them being hundreds of photographs and negatives. He was a structural engineer who worked on projects all over the world, and so he traveled extensively and always had a camera with him. When I came across the transparencies I immediately recognized that the images must have been
taken somewhere in Tahiti (my grandmother has relatives there). What struck me about these tiny images was their likeness to untouched nature, similar to what I would imagine prehistoric landscapes might have looked like. For me, they possess a sublime presence. My grandfather rarely took photographs of landscapes, and I suspect he must have felt especially compelled by it – though I’ll never know why. So for years I kept the transparencies with only a vague idea of doing something with them. Until recently, I never thought they would become a video.