2020 Filmmaker In Residence
2023 Completion Grant Recipient
DAUGHTERLAND documents a daughter’s obsession with her father’s untold story of survival. A poignant exploration of the lingering effects of trauma, the film chronicles one family’s struggle over identity, contested memory, and the reverberations of a father’s choices across generations. Shot over thirty years, DAUGHTERLAND features interviews with filmmaker Eva Brzeski's father and other family members, each holding versions of his story and various personal grudges. Home movies reveal a complex character, brooding and cantankerous, but with a zany joie de vivre. Fragments from his unfinished memoir carry us into the world of his boyhood, while my longing to connect takes me into an imagined past of strangers in strange lands. Richly textured and evocative, the film explores questions of identity, survival and self-determination.
Eva Ilona Brzeski is the award-winning writer, director and editor of Fellow American, This Unfamiliar Place, 24 Girls and China Diary, and the director and editor of the independent feature LAST SEEN. A graduate of the Stanford Masters Program in Documentary Film, she edited the acclaimed documentary films Under Our Skin, Unsettled (in post-production) As She Is, Twitch and was a co-editor on Serenade for Haiti and Sacrifice, as well as editing other documentary and narrative films & television series. Eva's films have screened worldwide at such festivals as Sundance and Tribeca Film Festival, and have received numerous awards. Eva lives in the Bay Area where she also works as a free-lance editor and studies meditation.
Project description and bios courtesy of the Resident