Going down the road, literally

Today during my Film Architecture class at Brown, I began thinking about another film that could further "explore" my thoughts on mobility, action in space, and the experiential effect that film could attribute by depicting moving through a physical stretch.

The idea is a personal narrative. Here is the story:

When I was eighteen, I got into USC's School of Cinema and Television on a full scholarship. Being the only child of my household, my slightly spendy father bought me a brand new 2006 Toyota Solara, fully equipped, and so on. So on "Move-in Day," my family (which consisted of my father, my mother, and I) drove down from Sunnyvale, CA (near San Jose) in two vehicles to go to USC. My father drove the van, which was full of my "stuff," and my mother and I followed in my new car behind him.

Right after we passed Los Banos, which was about 2 hours down, my father had a seizure at a rest stop. My mother had to go to the bathroom, which was why we pulled over at a roadside diner at the first place. So when I pulled up next to the minivan, what I saw was my father rolling down the window, convulsing. I ran into the diner, screaming for help, and soon after, my father was loaded into an ambulance.

Before I realized what time it was, it was getting dark out. Los Banos was kind of in the middle of nowhere, so the ambulance drivers asked my mother and I to tail the ambulance. We drove two cars, which would normally not be an issue, except for the fact that my overprotective father did not allow my mother drive on freeways, fearing that some type of inate incompetence (yes, how could he imagine?) would take over and she would get into an accident. So there she was, driving in on a long stretch of freeway, in the dark, by herself. I drove in front of her.

There were very few cars around us on the freeway. To our left and right, there was nothing. Barren, unlit fields, maybe. It felt like the edge of the earth. We soon, somehow, lost the ambulence, and I was just driving, down the dark road. Not knowing where I was, in the strongest state of panic that I have ever endured. For maybe the first time, I felt like things would not be alright, that there are stronger forces out there, taking me over, and my father was not there to protect me.

Out of the entire experience of my father's passing away, this moment was the most memorable. I distinctively remember my feelings at the time, and have as a result marked it the most painful.

The work that I want to do, as informed by this moment, is a video loop of the road. The space that contained this experience was very abstract and very infinite, no less very immersive in that it felt as if the disappearing vantage point in front of me was literally sucking me in. I want to retrace this physical path, film my point of view, and project it in a way that it expresses this experience filmmically and visually.