SXSW 2023 FILM REVIEW! For Mother’s Day one year, I secretly took all the photos and videos my wife had stored of our children on her iPhone and created a video called “A Mother’s Phone.”
Director Ian Cheney goes to far greater lengths to save his memories in his deeply philosophical, poignant, and profound documentary The Arc of Oblivion. As a filmmaker, Cheney has amassed a number of engaging characters on his quixotic quest to build an actual ark in the middle of his family’s Maine farm in order to store the years of footage he’s amassed.
It’s not some fool’s errand for the sake of theological devotion, though. Instead, Cheney is more interested in the existential meaning of memory, be it through troves of digital hard drives, rings on a towering tree that catalog the years, or layers of the past hidden in the rock.
“…amassed a number of engaging characters on his quixotic quest to build an actual ark…”
He is fortunate enough to have a wealth of experts in his inner circle to help give meaning and context to this endeavor: from a friend’s brother, Kirk Johnson (who happens to be a paleontologist and the director of Washington D.C.’s Museum of Natural History), to journalists Brian Palmer and Erin Hollaway Palmer who photographically examine humanity’s past in U.S. cemeteries.
There is even a guest appearance from fellow documentarian (and someone who knows a little about land-based boats) Werner Herzog, who stopped by to observe his project.
Cheney’s journey takes him around the globe as well, from limestone caves in Spain the remote Sahara Desert, to the Bahamas, where he speaks with teacher and poet Yasmin Glinton Poitier. She speaks of the devastation left behind in her community after Hurricane Dorian blew through in 2019. Her recollection of having her entire collection of family photos completely wiped away with the tide is particularly harrowing.
