Saved by the (Half) Elves:

In this paper, I look at how ethnographic filmmaking became research practice when I focused the lens towards the everyday life of my grandparents. Furthermore, I explore how imagistic, metaphorical, or even fantastical elements where the key to solving our audio-visual anthropological puzzle in a way that left my grandparents’ experiences open to different interpretations. Here dreams, metaphors and Icelandic folklore, situated somewhere near the borderlands of biomedical and mystical categorizations, helped me to engage with my grandparents’ earthly decline in a meaningful way, offering conclusions to complicated negotiations between what I know as rational and emotional, closeness and distance, familiar and mysterious. Finally, I look at the different potentials of film and a text, highlighting how different forms have enabled me to engage with this story in fundamentally different ways.