Will You Remember What I Choose to Forget? is a 150-minute oral history documentary film created with my own family across two domestic spaces in Shimla, North India: the old house that held three generations and the new house we moved into in 2020. Tracing memory, silence, and intergenerational care, the project emerged through a recognition that conventional oral history frameworks premised on distance, neutrality, and fixed ethical protocols were insufficient for work conducted within one’s own home. Filming my family revealed the need for ongoing, negotiated consent; an entanglement of authority; and ethical demands that surfaced only in practice. Through spatial filmmaking, embodied listening, and attention to ritual and silence, the project develops a methodological vocabulary for family oral history, treating architecture as witness and silence as presence. The film functions as a temporal and relational archive, documenting how memory is inhabited, negotiated, and carried across rooms, bodies, and generations.
Methodological-Statement_Avantika-SethAvantika Seth is an oral historian, filmmaker, and educator working across film, archives, and storytelling to explore memory, silence, and belonging. She holds an MA in Oral History from Columbia University, where her work focused on family oral history, ethics of care, and embodied listening practices. Her thesis film, Will You Remember What I Choose to Forget?, examines memory and intergenerational care through intimate oral histories created within her own family. Avantika has led and contributed to multiple oral history projects, including work on Afghan refugee resettlement in Iowa, the 1947 Partition Archive, and archival research at the Columbia Center for Oral History Research. With a background in journalism and documentary filmmaking, she brings a trauma-informed, ethically grounded approach to oral history across audio, video, and exhibition formats.