Captions provided by CCTubes – Captioning the Internet! A hand-painted stop-motion elegy, Ever Behind the Sunset traces the erasure of a family home by eminent domain, accompanied by a soundscape drawn from archival family VHS recordings.
*Link to documentary about the film: https://vimeo.com/1162539192
The film centers on the house and land where I grew up, seized through eminent domain in 2011 to widen High Point Road into what is now Gate City Boulevard in Greensboro, NC. That loss is intertwined with a series of personal and collective upheavals: the collapse of my father’s civil engineering and land-surveying firm after the 2008 housing crisis, my parents’ bankruptcy, his death, followed by my mother’s, and the community’s fight against the commercial development that would permanently alter their neighborhood.
The title comes from Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, which frames the westward frontier as an unknown space of possibility before it is measured, mapped, and bound. Around the time I read this passage, I discovered a photograph on my father’s old phone of the highway being paved over where our house once stood, shot facing west at sunset. That image – the sun melting into newly poured asphalt – crystallized and catalyzed the direction of the film.
Painting and animation by Jason Mitcham
Editing and sound design by Janus Fouché
@jason_mitcham
www.jasonmitcham.com