Using old film and photo material from her family archives, Wrbican tells, in narrative style, of her origins and her difficult relationship with her father, now dead. The personal historical story begins with 8mm films from the fifties which her father made of her grandparents; a Slovakian immigrant family in Pennsylvania. Her grandmother, as innocent as she may seem as she hangs up the washing, ensured that her husband ended up in a mental home whereby she got the family house in her own name. This house, that saw many turbulent years, is used metaphorically to represent the problematic relationship the maker of this video had with her father. With Polaroids and poetry, Wrbican reconstructs the memories of the past. The photos (a vast number of monochrome shots which conceal little) witness her father's unusual and obsessive devotion to photography. He made endless series of Polaroids of the rebuilding of the family house after it once burned down almost completely. On the back of each photo he wrote the date, the exact time and a few trivial data or details: "15 October 1980, twenty past five in the afternoon, normal lens; upper half of the guttering woodwork", "15 October 1980, twenty minutes past five in the afternoon, normal lens; lower half of the guttering woodwork" and so on. The poems read by Wrbican to accompany these images speak of a lack of understanding for her father who, in his total devotion to photography emotionally neglected his family and created distances between the people in the house. Self shot Super-8 films show that when her father became sick, the condition of the house got steadily worse. A final poem laments her father's hopeless sickness and the deterioration of the house which heads towards ruin due to neglect. Back Roof is a posthumous quest into the psyche of the father and a sensitive struggle for the correct form of (what proves to be) an honourable In Memoriam.
– Marieke van Hal
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Camera Sue Wrbican, Sam Wrbican, Sound Toby Fitch, Jon Eberie, Voice Ed Eberie, Dedicated to Sam Wrbican
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