Film Image
Epilogue: The Palpable Invisibility of Life
2006
Color
US
English/Vietnamese/French
English subtitles

Epilogue: The Palpable Invisibility of Life

How can we make visible the invisible? How can we "see" our lost loved ones? In EPILOGUE, Vietnamese-American filmmaker Tran T. Kim Trang looks for answers to these questions in the audio recordings of her dead mother, the handwritinng of the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the ultrasound photos of her newborn baby. Finding no ready-made answers, Tran invites us to reflect about life and death in this moving video essay about motherhood and mourning. EPILOGUE is the eight and final installment of Tran's THE BLINDNESS SERIES.

"When Derrida died in 2004, EPILOGUE shifted focus from his work on mourning to ruminate on 1) the visible and invisible traces one leaves behind: a font made from Derrida’s infamous handwriting, my mother’s dying words, etc.; 2) the cycle of life and death: my son’s birth on the same day, date, and time as my mother’s death six years prior; and 3) imaging technologies that allowed one to see an unborn child, leading to fantasies about what technologies it would take to 'image' an incorporeal mother, and discovering that ancient medicine can bring a daughter closer to her dead mother." —TRAN T. Kim-Trang
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Reviews
"Kim Trang-Tran's Epilogue: The Palpable Invisibility of Life is a cerebral yet touching examination of a mother-daughter relationship by way of Derrida and medical images." - Women of Color Film Festival 2007
"A rare video artist who is equally comfortable talking about Freud and the Khmer Rouge." - Steve Anderson, The Independent
Awards

Screenings
• Association For Asian Studies Conference, 2007
• National Museum of Women in the Arts' Festival of Film & Media, Washingtong DC, 2007
• Women of Color Festival 2007
• San Francisco Diasporic Vietnamese Film Festival, 2011

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