Dad’s Sake Box is a 70-minute essay film exploring image production, spiral time and estrangement. The project embraces fabulation as a tool for reconstituting memory in a society fractured by slavery. Set against the backdrop of post-colonial Brazil, the film examines how memory and absence shape personal and collective histories. The film’s structure follows Bantu concepts of time, starting with a box of photographs, postcards and Super 8 films discovered after the passing of the filmmaker’s father, a Black Brazilian engineer. His transformative trip to Japan, a profoundly homogeneous country, leads to a shift in self-perception—a double estrangement. By weaving together archival research, ethnographic fieldwork and cinematic storytelling, Dad’s Sake Box reimagines the relationship between fragmented images and memory, engaging with absence, displacement and the intimate links between personal and historical time.
Victor Dias, based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, is a filmmaker, editor and screenwriter. He is a co-founder of Apiário Creative Studio.
