Recently preserved by Chicago Filmmakers, The Grandfather Trilogy is Allen Ross' portrait of his grandfather in Bowling Green, South Carolina. Ross was a co-founder of Chicago Filmmakers and long time fixture in the Chicago filmmaking community. A profoundly moving work that attempts to come to terms with death as an event in the living world, The Grandfather Trilogy abounds with images which suggest stasis, absence, silence, horizontality, and oneness with the earth—a catalog of the conditions of death from the point of view of the living. "One of the ways I see the trilogy is as a radical approach to portraiture. Most of Papa was shot without looking through the viewfinder. There were, however, many accidents that happened while the camera was turned on. The film plays for me as a long sustained accident. I am grateful for this photographic record of a divinely shadowed presence. It is a reflection of a kind of space my grandfather generated."