Years later, I found a cardboard box with vhs cassettes and super 8 films outside a building that had been the Madison Theater on Grand Circus Park in Detroit shortly before the building was demolished. Most of the footage was a mix of home movies and magicians performing. I thought of the lives lead in these films—someone’s father, grandfather, son, mother, some great tricks, some great stories—and how after those lives had passed, those elements would fade. Like my grandparents’ painting, these were films of people who had been mythic in the lives of their families.

I created this film from a hybrid of that found footage and my own musings on the stories families tell one another to create these myths. Some of the myths were embroidered to make the truths more palatable, and some of this embroidery inevitably becomes more elaborate over time as it it becomes harder to separate fact from fiction the farther we get in time from the source.