Backstory Trailer (2009)

Backstory shows how illusion and reality are interchangeable, a process that is both "beautiful and quintessentially modern." Part of this year's Canadian entry to the Venice Biennale, Backstory operates dialectically, as an informational documentary on Hollywood studio history and as a work of conceptual art. Lewis filmed three generations of the Hansard family, professional craftsmen whose history traces back to the earliest days of rear-projection, and whose livelihood has become defunct with technological advances and the coinciding evolution in what constitutes reality in a Hollywood film.