When a loved one dies, what are we left with?

What remains when their physical presence no longer exists? In the material sense, people inherit the stuff of the deceased, but what is left behind is far more than that. In 306 Hollywood, Elan Borgarían and her brother Jonathan’s documentary, engage in an archeological-like dig of their late-grandmother’s home in a way that challenges conceptions of inheritance after death.

Elan Bogarín is an Emmy-winning Venezuelan-American director and cinematographer. Her and her brother Jonathan were born and raised in New York City and spent their lives regularly visiting their grandmother, Annette Ontell, at her home at 306 Hollywood in Hillside, New Jersey. When Annette died at 93 years old, the two siblings had accumulated 10 years of interviews and footage that captured both her compelling personality and the obvious adoration both of the film-makers shared for their grandmother.

Their film, 306 Hollywood, combines these years of footage documenting her life with the subsequent playful and loving dismantling of the home she lived in for 71 years. The result? A magical-realist documentary that draws from storytelling and fiction to breathe life back into the material things their grandmother left behind.

The story of Annette’s life is captured in the everyday and told through the simple and mundane things Elan and Jonathan inherited when she died. In an interview on 306 Hollywood, Elan suggests that “the people we interact with in our daily lives shape us, our society and values, more than anything, [but we] do not have the filmic language to express what makes them amazing”. Her and her brother’s film attempts to express the totality of her existence, as both profoundly impactful and yet, profoundly ordinary. Annette Ontell could’ve been reduced to a housewife, fashion designer, or a loving grandmother, but Elan and Jonathan somehow manage to capture a portrait of her that gives viewers a glimpse into the microcosm of a universe each person contains. Through stylistic choices that reveal her eccentric personality, her pride in her family and her little habits, the film gets as close as one can to capturing the singularity of a person; a portraiture of a life-lived in the accumulation of much more than material inheritance.

After Annette’s death, Elan and Jonathan “excavate” their grandmother’s house and play with this theme of material inheritance by creatively bringing the objects left behind back to life via recreations and storytelling. 306 Hollywood makes viewers question, is the material inheritance left behind after a loved-one’s death telling of the totality of the person? Or is the footage of her more illustrative of all that the two siblings inherited? When pondering the experience of grief and grappling with the complexity of her inheritance from her grandmother, Elan says:

“We had a grandma once, now we have stuff…there’s this amazing person that lives, breathes, talks – and now, junk”.

However, the documents, collectible items and “artifacts” that remained in the house prompted the two film-makers to realize “soon after [their] grandmother’s death that there was so much life in the objects still there”. Elan and Jonathan animate the “junk” left behind in their grandmother’s house that reveal one way a person, and what they pass on, goes beyond their material body. In some ways, Annette lives on in the little notes on the fridge, or the tooth brushes she never seemed to throw away, but on a more real level, she lives on in what Elan and Jonathan have inherited from her and take with them in their own lives.

306 Hollywood reveals how things do not equal a person. Elan and Jonathan in their archival dig of their grandmother’s home reveal their examination of their inheritance and the ways in which they carry it into the present. Much more than the stuff left behind by loved-ones, the film wrestles with the multi-dimensional nature of inheritance and the beauty and magic of a life-lived.