"SWEETBLOOD begins with my name, the name of the father. "Sanguedolce" in English means "sweet blood," so it seemed an appropriate way to title a diary film. In the film I look at a photo of myself and say, "The picture is me, the lines on my face are my father's." It began with my collection of still photos, it's part of growing up Italian, you don't throw anything out, so I had all these photos. I started pasting them up onto boards--one filled with old family portraits, another showed friends and lovers, another showed pictures of adolescence - Bob Dylan at the Gardens and vials of hash oil and Pabsy painting the Scrooge's face while he's asleep. They were snapshots, a life's journey in pictures, an archive I wanted to reconvene. I filmed them off the boards with a close-up lens, squeezing out frames like an action painter, adding motion to these still shots. Reassembling the family in-camera. The pictures replayed an archive of photographs and I decided to take the same approach with the sound, so I began compiling sounds collected over the past twenty years - interviews and late night jams, telephone calls and drunken talks, and cut them together as a fragmented mosaic. So now I had photos and voices. But something was still missing. At the time I was sleeping with a walkman next to my bed in order to record my dreams, keeping a dream diary. I wrote them all out and then pulled out moments or images that related to the pictures and wrote a kind of dream poem that appears in the film a line at a time. Overtop the pictures. So you watch the photos through these dreams, the dreams of the past and present joined in the film". - Steve Sanguedolce

"Driven by a montage of fragmented voice-overs that draft an elegaic weave of remonstrance, memory and sentiment, Sweetblood's pictures are drawn from a family's history of self representation - the endless heap of family photographs, rapidly reshuffled now between the filmmaker's lens, distant relations jammed together in the space of the filmmaker's close-up lens. Mounting a series of six "periods" of snapshots on foam core boards, then photographing them in single frame abandon, Sanguedolce presents a synoptic personal history begun with family weddings, and proceeding through grade school class photos, high school hipsters, a hockey montage, booze and drugs, a near fatal car accident, travels abroad, lovers and friends, the beginnings of his filmmaking career, and finally a last, difficult attempt to reconcile himself with his family. Superimposed over his photographic frenzy are dream texts presented one line at a time - culled from the maker's dream diaries, they serve as reminders that the family history is strained through language, and that the order of the read, the legible, remains the province of the looker, the audience. This intertextual flow, this family archaeology is finally delivered back to its audience as an open text, its passages of memory ordered according to the personal inclination of its attendant." - Mike Hoolboom

"Perhaps the most evocative short film in the program is Steve Sanguedolce's Sweetblood which examines the strained relationship between the filmmaker and his emotionally detached father. A collage of family photographs and cryptic subtitles fills the screen while the voices of his family and his personal thoughts are heard. An emotionally stirring film in which the pain of unresolved family issues washes over the viewer." - Ingrid Randoja, NOW Magazine

"Sweetblood's chief elements include a flurry of family photos, a collage of Italian immigrant voices and a bottle of red. Expertly made, this memoir is Steve Sanguedolce's hymn to his family, and his own secret history of the seventies." - Cameron Bailey, Festival of Festivals 1994