A woman roams an art gallery -- and remembers her painter father's love and lessons.
UNDERPAINT is used with permission from Anna Hopkins. Learn more at / annabanana_hops .
Anna is a young woman whose beloved father, Tom, passed away. Tom was a successful painter, and Anna now roams art galleries and museums, looking for a specific painting of her, one with a red boat floating on blue water.
As Anna searches, she remembers the lessons her father taught her. Not just about art, but about looking closer and appreciating the world around her. Between the memories and images, Anna discovers just how deeply his love and lessons connect to her life, now that he is gone.
Directed and written by Anna Hopkins, this thoughtful and lyrical short is a hybrid of drama and documentary, based on the late Canadian painter Tom Hopkins and his daughter Anna. Hopkins appears as herself as she roams art galleries and museums, looking for a specific painting that her father made. When she spots a young girl and her father in a gallery, looking at art together, it sparks an emotional odyssey that honors a father's artistry, parental influence and love, still so palpable after his passing.
The film could accurately be filed under the genre of memoir, using the storytelling techniques we associate with fiction to relay someone's emotional experience with an immersive intimacy that serves the film's internal focus well. For a film about an artist, the storytelling is likewise visually accomplished, with luminous light, clear beautiful colors and graceful movements, all of which work together to capture the feel of drifting through memories and thoughts as Anna wanders galleries and museums, looking for her father's art.
Anna's reckoning with her father's influence on her and her art forms the arc of the narrative. We see dramatizations of her conversations as a young girl with her dad, and while they're talking about art, he's also teaching her about perception, sensitivity and interacting with the world around her, seeing it in all of its beauty and textures. Throughout, we see detailed views of Hopkins's art, which is strikingly enigmatic, evocative and compelling -- much like the father's influence on his daughter.
An actress and filmmaker by profession and trade, Hopkins has an appealing and natural thoughtfulness in her screen presence, making her a compelling guide as she winds her way through different memories, thoughts and feelings. The sharpest of these is her grief for his absence from her life. When she finds the painting she is looking for, Anna realizes the space his death has left in her life. But the painting helps her realize that he is in a place far away, and she must let him go.
Lovely, heartfelt and gracefully told, UNDERPAINT is about an artist, but it is also about a daughter trying to keep her father alive for herself and the world. The most poignant objects he left behind -- his artwork -- are the most concrete, solid legacy she grasps. But in the film, she discovers the immensity and value of the less tangible things he gave her: an ability to look closer, to make meaning and to hold the contradictions of life and death together all at once.