Epitaph, 39 mins, 16 mm / video / found footage, DCP – 2026
* Programmers and curators, please email for a preview link
When personal histories become embedded within broader temporal and geographic dimensions, images and their localities may be understood as media that render the past visible—a testimony to existence itself.
In Epitaph, Cecilia Araneda returns to her long-estranged homeland, eco-processing 16mm film with leaves and fruit gathered around her ancestral home. The flickering, scratched celluloid of its decaying house becomes a medium of invocation, a spectral device that conjures memory.
Together with archival and found materials, it weaves a lament for her family’s past and the vanishing landscapes of home.
/ Beijing International Short Film Festival
Synopsis:
In Epitaph, filmmaker Cecilia Araneda returns to her long-estranged homeland, eco-processing 16 mm film with leaves and fruit gathered from her ancestral home, weaving a lament for her family’s past and the vanishing landscapes of home.
Filmed in both Chile and on the Tablelands in Canada, a site central to the modern understanding of plate tectonics, Epitaph incorporates eco-processed 16 mm footage, video, documents from public and private archives, and found footage to weave an epitaph to a home in the process of leaving the filmmaker, first as a result of exile and then to the gradual movement of time.
Epitaph has been eco-processed on-site in rural Chile at the site of the filmmaker’s father’s family using boldo, figs, fig leaves, walnut leaves, apples, apple leaves, fall grapes, fall grape leaves, olives, olive leaves, plums, mint, yard flowers and other vegetation.
Epitaph was made possible with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Thank you to Franci Duran, Chad Tremblay, Elian Mikkola and the Araneda Espinoza family for embarking on this journey with me.
