Vials to capture the day’s rain. Children assembling a skeleton, one bone at a time, over several weeks. A philosopher with a passion for Nietzsche and tap-dancing. Simple gestures: writing a letter, sewing a garment, planing wood. A book standing in for a headstone, a coffin in the shape of a fish. The word “today”, shouted like an anaphora. With false seriousness, a burlesque kind of gravity that nods to the Surrealists Ionesco or Perec, this film essay addresses the question of grief with a singular and offset approach. Alongside his friend writer and philosopher Jacques Soicher, filmmaker Claudio Pazienza digs into the process of erasure and how to grasp what has departed. What reality is present in the words we use to describe it? How can we conjure up what is disappearing? When does grief end? With more questions than answers, the two speakers “practice disappearing” just as easily at home as in public or travelling abroad; they discuss or fall into a brusque silence that speaks for them, as suggested by shots of them mute, microphones in hand. Everything is in everything.

Patrick Bergeron
Literature Professor, University of New Brunswick
Member of the editorial staff of the journal Frontières