The sense-scrambling, time-looping, identity-blurring effects of a nomadic life are echoed in the striking visual grammar of Sofia Brockenshire’s debut feature, a highly personal essay-film deeply rooted in the director’s own family history. Drawing on the diaries of her father Neil, who spent 30 years travelling the globe as a Canadian Immigration Officer, The Dependents is a haunted memory palace of loosely connected images, archive audio clips and contemporary interview material. With Brockenshire also serving as producer, cinematographer, editor and composer, this densely layered audiovisual tapestry feels impressively rich and rounded for what is essentially a one woman show.
The fuzzy narrative underlying The Dependents is a true family chronicle of international travel and multicultural mixing. But Brockenshire repeatedly reminds us how human memories can be selective and subjective, particularly when reassembled with the eye of an avant-garde collage artist. World premiering at Dok Leipzig this week, The Dependents is emphatically a rarefied festival item with one foot firmly in the art gallery. Indeed, the project grew out of the director’s studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. An uncharitable viewer could well dismiss it as a self-indulgent exercise in style over content. But it is also a superbly crafted exercise in visual mosaic, vibrant and musical, loaded with eye-catching techniques that this inventive young director could fruitfully apply to future films.
The dependents of the film’s English-language are Brockenshire’s Argentinean wife Teresa and three children, who were obliged to follow him around the world for decades, with extended stays in India, South Korea, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala and elsewhere. The family had little say in this restless itinerary, creating an unsettled rootlessness and lack of autonomy that Teresa addresses in one of her more spiky off-camera interviews. Her miserable memories of a subzero Ottawa winter, and the double standards of immigration policies applied by Canada and Argentina, also stir up heated debate. In one archive diary entry, Brockenshire seems to predict an inevitable marriage breakdown, but the director’s parents still appear to be together as her film slowly pulls together its fragmentary non-linear narrative.
Now deep into retirement age but still spry and alert, Neil Brockenshire serves as the film’s central narrator, sportingly submitting to his daughter’s interrogation, reading poetic extracts from his diaries accompanied by images from the family’s vast archive of photo slides. Around this loose narrative spine, the director then adds masses of visual and audio material: crackly recordings of childhood songs, an ancient Korean radio interview, evocative snapshots of old friends and former houses, Google Street View images smoothly blended with first-hand footage shot at the same location, found sounds and more. In places this crazy-paving effect becomes willfully avant-garde, scratchy visual abstraction soundtracked by chimes and clonks, bursts of childlike electronica and dissonant noise. Sound designer Julian Flavin does vivid, effective work here.
Brockenshire’s free-ranging collage approach sometimes recalls the hallucinatory style of experimental essay-flm director Adam Curtis (Bitter Lake, Hypernormalisation). There are also cosmetic echoes here of other recent female bio-doc directors drawing on parental archives to tell universal stories, notably Firouzeh Khosrovani’s Radiograph of a Family (2021) and Natasa Urban’s The Eclipse (2022). But The Dependents lacks the firm narrative and political intent of these examples, leaning more towards a purely personal and unashamedly aesthetic exercise.
That said, Brockenshire does touch elliptically on more concrete themes of displacement, immigration and multicultural families. Some tragic cases that the director’s father was involved with, such as granting a Canadian visa to 27-year-old Guatemalan activist Beatriz Eugenia Barrios Marroquin just a day before she was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by anti-Communist terror squads, deserve to be examined with more journalistic rigour than the fleeting reference contained here. But that would require a different, altogether darker documentary than this. On its own terms, The Dependents is a highly original and hauntingly beautiful film about the power of memory, both real and artfully reconstructed.
Director, producer, cinematography, editing: Sofía Brockenshire
Sound design: Julian Flavin
Music: Julian Flavin, Sofía Brockenshire
Venue: Dok Leipzig Film Festival (International Competition)
Production company, world sales: Sofia Brokenshire
In English, Spanish, Korean
90 minutes
