Sponsored Project:
"Rearview"
Genre: Documentary
Phase: Post Production
About the Film:
Rearview is a 12-15 minute observational documentary following Adam “Howie” Howard and his 18-year-old daughter Toni on a 2,500-mile road trip from Vermont to Western Colorado University in Gunnison, where Toni is beginning her freshman year. Howie made the same journey 30 years earlier in the same 1971 VW Bus, and before they could leave Vermont, the two of them spent the summer getting it ready to make the trip again.
Howie has kept the same journal since the 1990s, and it has ridden along on every trip he and the bus have ever taken. During this one, he wrote in it every day, working through what he was feeling in real time, before the road softened anything. Those entries, read aloud by Howie in his own voice, form the narrative spine of the film. There is something particular about hearing a person read their own words aloud. It isn’t performance. It’s closer to confession. The journal gives the film an interior life that observational footage alone couldn’t provide, a window into what the trip meant to Howie as it was happening, not in retrospect. The footage grounds that voice in place and texture, the van, the road, the landscape opening up as Vermont gives way to the West. Howie’s words and the journey itself create a foundation for the story that neither could carry alone.
