Slamdance with Arielle: History of Love

It’s my pleasure to introduce Arielle, my wife and an eager new contributor who is covering the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City this year, along with a few Sundance selections.

Director Sonja Prosenc discusses the film
History of Love
Directed by Sonja Prosenc
Breakout Features

Portraying a narrative about love and loss, “History of Love” tells the story of a family mourning the death of their wife and mother. As they uncover secrets about the life she lived, they are forced to engage with their grief and the world around them in unusual and unexpected ways. Felt by the audience as a real and raw experience of grief, director Sonja Prosenc explained that she was actually grieving a family member who was dying during the filming process, making this story all the more real, painful, and necessary for her to share with the world.

The film employs vivid imagery and sound to convey the overwhelming, sometimes drowning, effects of grief on loved ones. The director intentionally uses water to illustrate fluidity of bereavement and the sadness that often overtakes life, though the film sometimes feels as if it was moving at a trickling pace. Nonetheless, as an aspiring chaplain, I feel this film does a tremendous job of capturing the vastly different ways in which individuals grieve, even within a single family. Age, relationship to the deceased, and anxiety about loss can all be tremendous influencers in one’s grief process, and I appreciate the fact that the characters do not try to alter how the others experience their loss. Through anger, sadness, despair, and reminiscing, each character is able to find some peace within the pain, learning and showing us how to live again after loss.

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