What these ashes wanted

Directed by Philip Hoffman

What these ashes wanted, I felt sure, was not containment but participation. Not an enclosure of memory, but the world.

Completed in 2001, what these ashes wanted—which combines hand-processed film, video diaries, found sound, text and narration—is a ritual of grief that seems both shared and private. Our own stories of grief fill the gaps between Hoffman’s images of Egyptian tombs, wintertime frolics and insect activity.