My Thoughts on Filiation

The concept of memory through the lens of someone else is very interesting. Sometimes you know someone – or at least you think you do – but it takes a deep investigation to fully understand that person and the memories you have of them. In both the documentary My Architect and Rocío G. Davis’s article “Documentary Constructions of Filial Memory in Nathaniel Kahn’s My Architect and Nicolás Entel’s My Father, Pablo Escobar,” I was introduced to the interesting subgenre of filiation.

The two men, Kahn and Entel both had limited relationships with their fathers due to the fact that their father’s work and personal lives left very little room for the development of the parental relationship that most people expect. After his father dies, Kahn goes on a journey of discovering who his father was and records the interviews and information that he gains in the documentary. For him, this is a way to gain a closer relationship with his father that he never had the chance to when his dad was alive. As Davis writes, this investigation is a mix of both biography and autobiography, as Kahn’s research began as a way of telling his father’s story, and along the way he is able to discover things about himself.

For Entel, on the other hand, had a relationship with his father, but strains caused a divide. Later on, Entel desires to get to know who his father was, not having that knowledge on hand, and he conducts a similar filiatory research.

I find both of these men’s stories interesting because I find that in a way, there is always a grey area that children have in understanding their parents and their pasts, although not always to that extreme. Doing such in depth research on the person who has a major influence on your being, regardless of how much time you may have spent directly with them, is a very powerful means of introspection.