Family Portrait

The film begins as a tragicomic everyday portrait of a Texan extended family. Then, almost imperceptibly, it transcends all confines of time and space, dream and reality.

On a gorgeous summer day, a family comes together on a large estate in Kerrville, Texas (in real life, it belongs to the director’s grandparents). For Barbara, the mother of the family, nothing is more important on this morning than organizing a group photo. But suddenly she disappears without a trace. Of all the family members who are present, only her daughter Katy seems interested in what happened to her mother. The director stages Katy’s subsequent search as a journey into her inner self, drawing inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe, John Carpenter and the French philosopher Roland Barthes. In his famous book on photography, Barthes described family photos as an attempt at achieving immortality. In this film, however, death is already present before the picture is even taken. Ravishingly beautiful.

 

After the screening on November 22, director Lucy Kerr and Robert Folger, director of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at the University of Heidelberg (CAPAS), will talk about the apocalyptic interpretation in the film.

Director