For this project, I wanted to explore what it meant to create a “documentary”. Through essay-style writing, GarageBand voice recording and video production on iMovie I created “mother”. The nine minute and forty-one second video now has a home on the platform YouTube and is public for the world to see. “mother” is what I would describe as an extremely-nonlinear story or even just an account placed out of context. Upon first viewing, one would likely find it confusing. It is in its truest form experimental and challenging, yet hopefully lends towards a very real situation.

The subject of the video comes from both a recent happening and a lifelong journey my mother, Eileen, has been on. Her twin sister and she were given up for adoption at birth and never knew their biological parents. The twins’ adoptive dad passed away when they were only eight years old and their mother in 2012. Alice, their adoptive mother, had always been in full support of them seeking out their biological parents. My mom’s sister, Aunt Kathleen, recently took one of those “ancestry DNA” type of things and found out that she had biological relatives that tested through the same service. As it turned out, it was her half sister. My mother and Aunt Kathleen did some digging on Facebook and it led them to the woman, Siobhan, who told them about their other half siblings and their very much alive mother.

It’s a complicated tale for all sides. My mom and aunt always knew they were adopted and there was a chance that these people could be out there. However, Siobhan’s family had no idea of their mother’s first two children. Could you imagine the questions that all her children had for her? Her name is Marilyn Quinn, and she unfortunately could not answer any of these questions as she is at a very bad stage of Alzheimer’s disease. Recently, my sister, mother and aunt had the opportunity to go meet Marilyn at her nursing home. My sister, Victoria, shot a twenty-minute video on her phone of the event and showed us when they got home. I didn’t know how to feel about it. I could only imagine the severity of this situation to my mother, but her not getting any answers or recognition from her biological mother. In a way this moved me, and compelled me to write an essay. It is my account of the situation.

In a way, I think my writing-turned-video is a documentary about my mother and therefore a documentary about me because, after all, I wouldn’t be here without her personal story.

PHILOSOPHY

I recently read about philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Beetle in a Box. He proposes that everybody is given a box with a beetle inside. No one can see each other’s beetle, yet one could describe it for another. It comes to the point that the beetle in the box is simply relative and is only what we make out of it. I think this documentary relates to this idea because the beetle in the box is like one’s life experience. I have no true way of knowing what my mom’s life was like, but this is me trying to understand what this experience was like based off her description of the beetle in the box.