In Your Father's Shadow

In Your Father's Shadow centers on an older man, named Arty, who recounts his tumultuous relationship with his late father to his niece, Nera. However, the recollection of a life-threatening ordeal from the past, where the spirit of Arty’s father helped save his life, manages to mend the familial bond and love shared between himself, his deceased father, and Nera. It’s through the retelling of this story to his niece that Arty gains a believer that reaffirms his sense of worth, while she finds an understanding friend in him.

This film seeks to examine the possibility of individuals being able to move forward with their lives when they are tied to the shadows of their pasts, pasts that happen to center around their immediate families. Do they embrace these shadows to move on with their lives? Reject them? Will the decisions they make ultimately set their spirits free?

With cinematography and editing that allows audiences to hang onto every little expression of the characters in the film, a combination of film techniques that harken back to the works of Sam Mendes and Steven Spielberg (The Road to Perdition (2002) and War Horse (2011)), In Your Father’s Shadow hopes to take the concept of a broken family and analyze what can lead to these fractures in familial bonds. This introspective look at the inner workings of what keeps a family unified, coupled with the visually poignant emotional journey of the film’s characters across multiple generations, may hopefully shed light on the key factors that unify and keep a family of multiple generations together during even the most difficult and extraordinary of times.

In order to further progress this concept of familial unification without overly-complicating the personal arcs of the film’s characters, I chose to focus my efforts on creating two distinct story locations: the present day versus the 1970s. By implementing diffused lighting that gradually transforms into warmer light tones in the present day setting of the film, the film is able to showcase to audiences the reparation of familial ties between two generations of broken families. The dark and dangerous aesthetic of the 1970s warehouse flashback, on the other hand, creates a stark enough contrast to situate the memories of the past as a time best left forgotten and moved beyond by Arty.

My crew and I are students in the Media Arts and Culture Program at Occidental College, and In Your Father's Shadow is my senior thesis film. Ryan Rambach, Cullen Parr, and I are no strangers to filmmaking, as our last big collaboration was on the music video, Strange Nostalgia, which serves as a testament to the type of quality work that can be expected when the three of our minds come together on any project. You can view Strange Nostalgia at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WST9vQlBGWY.

While taking this film along the U.S. festival circuit is the next step in our filmic endeavor, Ryan, Cullen, and I plan to stay in touch after college and continue to direct, produce, and edit each other’s films in the Los Angeles area. I currently have three other projects in the works: a trilogy sci-fi series about life on Earth after there is no longer water on it, a road trip movie in the same vein as The Hangover (2009), and a 1950s period piece about a Mexican welterweight champion during the Korean War. This experience has been a good one for me in terms of revealing the massive amounts of planning that are required if a film shoot is to be carried out in a smooth and efficient manner. For that life lesson, I thank the college and Dr. Broderick Fox for all of the guidance that has been offered to me.