My Father Died Three Times

Clara Simas's photobook “My father died three times” is a posthumous collaboration with her father—an actor in Brazil’s 70s Cinema Marginal and Super-8 movements. Through fiction and archive, it explores grief and the traces of a man who died many times.

The photobook My father died three times is born from a posthumous collaboration between a dead man and a living woman. Moving through an ambiguous terrain, Clara Simas tells stories about her process of dealing with the loss and the remembered presence of Caveirinha – journalist, iconoclast, and actor in Bahia’s Cinema Marginal and Pernambuco’s Super-8 Film Cycle during the 1960s and 1970s in Brazil –, her absent father.

In a pendulum swing between the poles of document and fiction, this autobiographical exploration unveils and recomposes the many faces of a multiform character, piecing together images from various sources, while addressing questions on the labor of grief and the strategies for working-through the systematic physical absence of father figures and the symbolic disappearance of these men in the lives of adult subjects.

In this investigation, grief is embraced as an embodied presence in the author’s life, as she follows the traces of desire left by a man who was many. Folding different materialities and layers of time, father and daughter together bring to life memory and the stories that survive – be they contained in a photograph, in a historic document, or in the movie scenes where this man performed and, repeatedly, died.