ParaTheatrical ReSearch

1908, Paris. Over three fever-dream nights in the Hotel Biron, poet Rainer Maria Rilke encounters the ghost of his good friend, artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, who died shortly after giving birth to her first child. In response to this haunting, Rilke writes his epic prose lament, "Requiem for a Friend", as a tribute to Paula and to women torn between choosing a life sacrificed to Art or to Motherhood. One hundred years later, three women - a painter, an actress and a dancer - and a theatre director prepare to stage Rilke's "Requiem" in Berkeley California as abstract performance ritual.

Set in Port Townsend, San Francisco, and the "bardo terrains of the soul realm," this promising 70-minute debut feature (shot in Hi-8 and 3/4" video and Super 8 film) is a visionary exploration of an elderly bedridden man's interior journey toward death and beyond. It's also a sometimes humorous, sometimes heartrending portrayal of his family's changing perceptions of the process of death. It follows the final day in the life of an elderly patriarch who has lapsed into an intermittent coma. As he dies, his son returns home to visit the family, where he unexpectedly participates in an ancient ritual of ancestral origins.