Crepescule Pond and Chair

Crepescule Pond and Chair

2001 · 6 min

CREPESCULE POND AND CHAIR is a little elegy song, simultaneously celebrating a life and mourning a family's personal loss. Disabled by muscular dystrophy, Sandra Davis' brother used a wheelchair for most of his life. Despite the long, gradual degeneration of his physical condition, he lived with great spirit and heart, married, raised two children, volunteered for his church, and was still working at his profession and building a fish pond on his land, when he died suddenly of complications of MD at age 52. When the filmmaker herself was disabled in an auto accident, his attitude of practical adaptations to physical impairments was one that made it easier for her. In an irony of life, a little Christmas message from him arrived two days after his sudden death. This event impelled Davis to respond with a film. The chair was his mobility in life; the pond he created was his dream.

Directed by Sandra Davis

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Crepescule Pond and Chair

A Preponderance of Evidence

Both from Sandra Davis.

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