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El reflejo
2010
Video, 24 min, Co-Directed and Co-Produced with Eduardo Kohn

El reflejo is an ethnographic film concerning the relationship between memory, images, and death. It attends to the gestures, mannerisms, and silences of an elderly Italian Jew to convey something of how she remembers her past. Giving voice to her everyday memories—the light reflecting on a wall of her childhood room, the sun that fades her sister’s portrait, the smell of a perfume bottle she first opened sixty years before— Costanza Di Capua, who fled Nazi Europe in 1939 to make her home in Ecuador, shows us how life inheres in the smallest details. Through its attention to the fragmentary and sometimes disorienting images of memory, el reflejo gestures to the poetry of our lives. Filmed in what was to be the last year of her life, these images (or reflections) don’t speak to biography in any conventional sense but to the fragments of life at the edge of death.

Screenings:
Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival, July, 2010.