An elaborate experiment with the concept of before-and-after photographs, Your brother. Remember? splices and dices home videos, Hollywood film footage, and live performance. As kids in rural Maine, Zachary Oberzan and his older brother Gator loved making home versions of their favorite films, most notably Jean-Claude Van Damme’s karate opus Kickboxer and the notorious cult film Faces of Death. Then twenty years passed. Estranged from his family, Zack returned to his childhood home to re-create these films, shot for shot, as precisely as possible—but now seen through a twenty-year lens of emotional and physical wear and tear. One brother became an actor, and one self-destructed. Which is which? How different are these lives? Could this story have turned out the other way around? Initially conceived as a film experiment, the project morphed into a live multimedia piece which was recorded and ultimately incorporated into the finished film.

Oberzan’s film will be preceded by Their Houses, Cam Archer’s phantasmagorical inquiry into the very notion of the home video, in which the filmmaker limns his suburban cul-de-sac for hidden truths, dreaming pathways into imagined homes, hidden rivers under the streets, the marginalized world of coyotes on the outskirts, and the knotty mythologies of all the beautiful neighbor boys. The two films, both of which are enjoying their Chicago premiere, compliment one another richly in their stark deviations as well as in their uncanny rhymes. Where Oberzan’s film unfurls in snowy Maine, Archer’s is diametrically set in sunny Santa Cruz. The grainy and under-lit VHS recordings of Oberzan’s film wash ashore of Archer’s sun-bleached and psychedelically lurid Hi8 cassette footage. In the most serendipitous turn of all, Cam Archer captures his own pair of teenage brothers who are making art to pass the time, giving them the film’s indelible closing words: “I don’t give a fuck about anyone…except my brother.”