marigold

The Film

A few years ago, going through a box of his grandfather's things, Dusty Dale Barker found a previously unknown reel of 8mm Kodak Kodachrome film. He had it digitized. It turned out to be four minutes of footage from the family farm in 1959 that nobody had seen in almost sixty years.

His grandfather fly fishing in the river. His grandmother cleaning fish. His great-grandmother, his mother, and his aunt around the farmhouse.

After a trip to Berlin and a conversation with his mother about his grandfather's service in the Battle of the Bulge, Barker wrote a poetic essay and paired the farm footage with Kodak VHS from the nineties, watching the same family move through different stages of life.

marigold is a six-minute documentary built from that footage, plus a present-day passage Barker filmed in his Nashville living room, his own narration, and an original score by Lauren Conklin recorded with the Budapest Scoring Orchestra. He wrote it, directed it, narrated it, and produced it.

His grandparents have been gone more than twenty years. The farm is no longer in the family.

It is a film about being the last one who remembers.