My Life Before I Was Born

2021

78 minutes  

This film is an autobiographical memoir about my parents.  I began it in 2011 but I was not ready to tell it until ten years had passed. Some stories need time, particularly love stories.   

This film came about because I missed my parents and wanted to draw them and make them live again on the screen. One of the pleasures for me was drawing my father's paintings because I feel the films and paintings I make are powerfully connected to this legacy. The other pleasure was drawing the world of my parents-- in wartime and after-- a lost world today.  Drawing the dead ones is hard; in the end none of the faces look exactly like the real people but I believe my surrogates convey who they were.  

This film has a sad but redemptive story to tell, one that involves betrayal, trauma, and tragic loss. It is also the story of how love and art can heal these losses. 

This is my most personal film, and although I felt compelled to make it, I seriously wondered if it would be destined to have an audience of only one. When it was rejected from a festival which had always supported me in the past, I decided to not submit it to more festivals, so if you are watching this film here, consider this the premiere, and if you like it, thank Charles and Jane.

I returned to the composer Kevin MacLeod, whose tracks helped me make my first films.  

Parts of the script draw from three poems  by Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose estate generously granted me permission to quote her magnificent words.

The epigraph of the film is the inscription on my parents' grave marker, a quote from the great illustrator, Howard Pyle: "Quicken our souls that we may realize the majesty of simple things."