Thomas Geoffroy
A Showman’s Daughter
A Showman’s Daughter is a conceptual documentary moving image piece. I was given the opportunity to work with twenty-three super 8 films from my family archive, and with them I produced a piece that documents the life of someone growing up within a travelling showman family, namely, my mother. I come from a family of travelling showmen and I have always been told stories of that lifestyle by her and her siblings—but I had never seen or felt it for myself. The sequences were selected for those that featured my mother as a main point of focus. We see her transform from a young child sitting in the middle of a speedway track into a young woman. Through those films, the countless conversations with my mother, and the process of making this piece I was able to see and feel those years of her childhood with a kind of clarity that had eluded me before.
