In The Video Story, artist and filmmaker Vartan Avakian assembles home VHS footage shot with the camera his father — a mechanic and undertaker — once bought. Through this material, Avakian examines his family relationships, exploring themes of oral and filmed history, spatial and temporal distance, and the class differences brought on through cultural and social divides between him and his father.
“He bought a video camera in 1983, and nothing has been the same since. “Films are reality,” he told me. Some years later, he asked for Nicole Ballan’s leaked sex tape. The Video Story is based on the home video archive of a family, whose relationship to reality and fantasy drastically changed when a VHS camera was introduced to their lives.” (Vartan Avakian)
