I’ve never heard my father’s voice.

My father died when I was two-years-old, leaving me with no memory of him. Seven years ago, I began a project of digitizing archival footage of my father, Mario, that was kept in a storage closet in the high school we both attended. I picked out tapes from the years my father attended Cape May County Tech, put them in a cardboard box, and was eager to hand them over to my teacher who would turn the VHS tapes into digital files. However, the project lost momentum when I graduated high school and was ultimately abandoned.

Today, those tapes still sit in that cardboard box, gathering dust. As I prepare to graduate college, the mystery of what lies on that footage still haunts me. I am desperate to return to my hometown and pick up the process of digitizing those tapes, reconnect with friends and family that knew my father, and share my journey along the way. This feels like my last chance to obtain that footage before the tapes are gone forever and experience a visual form of Mario for the first time.

- Maria Gonzalez