Status: In Production • Creative Non Fiction • 30 minutes
Logline A daughter finds a loophole in memory—and crosses to the other side of her father’s story.
Synopsis: When Victoria was sixteen, her grandmother handed her a cassette her father recorded decades earlier—his voice, young and unafraid, narrating slides from a year abroad in Sweden. It became a small door in memory—a loophole.
The Memory Loophole follows Victoria as she steps through that door to assemble a father from fragments: the hallway of his Stockholm dorm; Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, a place he longed to see; Paris—the trip he promised but never took with her. Along the way she contends with the quiet shattering of her childhood: a closeted gay father in small-town California, an HIV diagnosis, and a slow decline that ended in AIDS-related suicide four days before her eleventh birthday.
The film weaves present-tense travels with intimate voiceover—on grief that evolves, on danger mistaken for sophistication, on the bicycle lessons where a parent lets go and the child rides on. As Victoria moves from being in service to memory to letting memory be in service to her, can she release her father and claim her own life?
Why this story, why now
A personal lens on LGBTQ+ history and the AIDS crisis—from the child of a closeted parent.
A meditation on grief as an ongoing relationship, not a finish line.
A portrait of survivor’s guilt transforming into permission to live with joy.
An invitation to use story, memoir, and imagination as tools for healing.
The Journey (story world)
Stockholm: The tape’s origin; a hallway, a doorknob, a keyhole back to who he was when he was free.
Cambodia / Angkor Wat: The place he dreamed of; she goes for both of them.
Paris: The promise city—cold, aloof, and too much like him—where she finally says goodbye.
Impact & partnerships (in progress)
We are developing collaborations with organizations aligned with the film’s themes—AIDS/LGBTQ+ history, grief and survivor support, mental health, memoir & literary communities, and university programs. Ideal partners include:
GMHC, Visual AIDS, The LGBT Center (NYC), APLA, GLAAD, Modern Loss, What’s Your Grief, The Dinner Party, AFSP, NAMI, and college programs in Gender & Sexuality, Public Health, Psychology/Social Work, Narrative Medicine, and Creative Writing.
Materials (work-in-progress)
10-minute story sample (private link on request)
Teaser trailer (coming soon)
Press kit / impact deck (in development)
Request a screener or deck: onartprojects@gmail.com
Director’s note
I’m drawn to moments where the past, present, and imagined future touch—where a memory loophole appears. Victoria’s voice invites us into that threshold: not to re-stage the past, but to walk through it and emerge changed. After delivering See Memory to PBS, I wanted to bring that same rigor and tenderness here—crafting a film that honors one father’s complicated truth and a daughter’s radical empathy. —Viviane
Key creative team
Director/Painter/Producer: Viviane Silvera
Subject (VO): Victoria Loustalot (NYT Modern Love contributor; author of This Is How You Say Goodbye)
Producers: Sophia Michelen and Alyssa Melani
Cinematography / Editing / Score: In progress (announcements soon)
Featuring: Archival materials from family collections and personal recordings
Get involved
Partners & Hosts: Invite a work-in-progress screening, classroom visit, or community conversation.
Educators: Request a discussion guide (draft) for courses in memoir, grief studies, LGBTQ+ history, or public health.
Supporters: Underwrite finishing funds, impact screenings, or accessibility (captions, ASL).
Contact: onartprojects@gmail.com
Festival & release plan
Work-in-progress festival previews → finished short-feature (≈30 min) festival run → community/education tour → broadcast/streaming.
Programming
“Conversations After Death”: panels on evolving relationships with the dead.
“What If” workshops: art/writing imagining the lives our loved ones might have had.
Writing prompt series