Henry Hudson and His Son

Home movies. A dentist father who takes seductive photos of his wife on the beach. And in prime place, the 17th-century British explorer in the film title, whose portrait lies in storage at the Tate Gallery and who disappeared along with his teenage son after mutineers had cast them adrift in a shallop… There is a joyfully Dadaist side to the cathartic catalogue that the filmmaker puts together in place and stead of a portrait of his own father. Yet, something more than playful self-derision emanates from this diversity of materials and shot scales (super-8 film, a model boat in the mist blown along by a hair-dryer…). In a first person narrative, Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc questions what he will inherit, willy-nilly, from his bearded paterfamilias. Slowly, in the mist characteristic of the impossible communication between father and son, the film advances into a feeling of disquiet fuelled by a historical doubt: Hudson’s crew, adrift in their rowboat, could well have been guilty of cannibalism…