EKKAHART’S OAK

A documentary self-observation: Charlotte Ella Bouchon turns the camera on herself with radical subjectivity as she looks for her grandfather’s grave beneath an oak tree in the forest. She’s not trying to commemorate him, but rather to make sure that he’s really gone. Each and every gesture and movement in Bouchon’s film is marked by her ambivalent relationship to her grandfather. How do you grieve for someone you didn’t like, but who was there all the same? The film discusses this question through documentary images commented on by a female narrator and a literally microscopic view of what remains of someone who is no longer in this world and yet still very much there.

Luca Schepers