Under the Red Sun

This is a film made from some footage taken in the summer of 2020, a road trip my family took after filming Summertime. I sat on this footage for a while, the beauty of the landscape and the, quite frankly, boredom of the car keeping me from cutting it. But this trip was meaningful for us, in a kind of inexpressible way, specifically this footage of the deserted Grand Canyon. We felt like crusaders, falling into a long tradition of American kinship to this land that wasn’t ours.

Music from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly fades in with that of Once Upon A Time in The West as my brother falls asleep on a road trip leading to a dream of the American West as narrated by my father. You can hear my father’s voice reading the forward to True West by Robert B. Parker, a kind of ill-attempted defense of the problematic genre. The Western is a genre of film that has spotted my childhood. My dad seems to love the independence and the machismo of these “men with guns” (Parker). Here I have saturated the screen with the West.

This film is littered with my family: our most controversial game of Monopoly colliding with my dad’s Western affiliation. In this strange game play, I hope to digest the west and its many associations. All under the red sun.