Institute History
Description
An unseen narrator unfolds the constellation of familial relationships of Jesse Damrosh, born in 1987, chronicling the dissolution of his parents’ marriage and the feuds, money concerns, and deaths that define a typical middle-class American existence. Yet in this impressionistic account of one life, what penetrates the most are not events but incidents. The beautiful yet quotidian moments of the shoulder-padded jacket of an aunt, the certain print of a rug, an ad for Kodak film, or the light in a room one afternoon from years before.
A participant in the 2021 Biennale College Cinema program, The Cathedral is writer-director Ricky D’Ambrose’s semi-autobiographical reflection and attempt to memorialize a specific time in his own life. Part portrait of the artist as a young man and part catalog of the objects, people, and moments that characterized some 20 years of America, The Cathedral is a poetic and experiential meditation on youth and the recent past, but one less interested in memory than in measure.