Supersymmetry
2015 · 6m · USA
Directed by Trent Jaklitsch
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
A personal cine-essay in which director Trent Jaklitsch interweaves his own childhood home-movie footage with NASA archival space imagery to form an ode to his father, meditating on how the universe creates us and how we, in turn, create the universe.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's doing the 'found footage + archival mashup' now, but Jaklitsch actually commits to something weird here—he's not just winking at the juxtaposition, he's letting the cosmic scale genuinely *swallow* the domestic, which most filmmakers would chicken out on.
This is exemplary essay cinema: the formal decision to collapse private memory into NASA imagery isn't decorative but structural, situating itself in a lineage from Marker through contemporary lyric documentary while executing that tension with real rigor.
The cut between a child's face in home footage and the roil of a nebula—that's the entire film working in one moment, a single editorial decision that proves you don't need budget to access the mythic when you understand where to place the camera's attention.
Reviews
an inspirational tale for all of us about how the universe created us and how we create the universe