L’Amour 2 (1993) Myra Paci

Short mixed 16mm film and video piece. 7 minutes. Experimental documentary short about the dying and death of my father shot off a tv monitor with a bolex. Directed, Edited, and Produced by Myra Paci This is a short film I made about the process of my father Piero Paci’s illness and death from pancreatic cancer. While he was dying I shot a lot of video, took audio recordings of him, and shot lots of photos. He didn’t want to be recorded at this stage of his life; I did it anyway, for better or worse. I transferred the video footage to film by shooting it off a tv monitor with a 16mm non-sync camera on b&w stock. Then I edited the material, laying down audio from family discussions between my parents, my siblings and me, family friends, and phone calls between my father and his parents in Italy. Jimi Hendrix’ “Are You Experienced?“ was completely appropriate to what I felt at the time -- not for its obvious implications but for an entirely different, but in some ways similar, type of experience -- coming face to face with death. L’Amour 2 was the beginning of my filmmaking work and was the seed for subject matter of my feature film, Searching for Paradise.