The Dust of the Ancestors
After 20 years absence, museum guard Eusebio returns to his old home town in the Mexican backcountry, his mind set on finally making peace with the Rojas family. None of his old friends from that family are alive anymore. Only for this one day, the Day of the Dead, they come back from the Great Beyond to celebrate with the living. But ghosts of the past are reawakened by news of the tragic death of little Benito Rojas and these ghosts will soon force Eusebio to run away again. He tries to convey comfort to Benito’s mother through a letter: Eusebio is firmly convinced that the dead continue to exist and that they will only crumble into dust if they fade into oblivion.
Testimonials
"With 'The Dust of the Ancestors', Felix Pestemer has created a sophisticated, powerful book, which narrates stories of death and remembrance without ever drifting into gloom." (Andreas Hartung, Der Tagesspiegel)
"The main strengths of 'The Dust of the Ancestors' are the graphic elements. With the arrangement of the panels, from classic segmentation to double-page images, the Berliner-by-choice Pestemer makes use of the whole variety of options available to comic book artists. And a topic that in Germany often causes unease more than anything else is fully addressed: Death is a part of life. It is the knowledge of how to remember that is taking the sting out of death - it just happens that in our country this knowledge has mostly been buried." (Markus Lippold, n-tv)
"Felix Pestemer is a good narrator and an excellent colorist with a keen sense for details. Lavish compositions are his strength, the arrangement of material objects in particular. Building on profound research on the topic, the illustrator and author has succeeded in creating an autonomous docufiction full of empathy and irony - as well as, and not least of all, an extraordinary contribution to intercultural communication." (Andreas Rauth, Jitter Magazin)
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