A new generation of storytellers is going back to the personal archive to narrate their own lives, and through the intimate, is arriving at the political. As filmmakers are coming of age and revisiting home videos to find traces of their past selves, or as they look to their family and themselves as protagonists, some questions emerge. What care must be taken when telling your own story? How does one steer clear of navel gazing at a time when the personal essay boom and the memoir industrial complex has taken over, fetishizing the self? What can the personal archive offer in terms of tenderness, intimacy, and irreverence that re-makes cinema in its form?
