By Jack Schwed
However, this changed when the senior at Clark University returned from her photography class one day last year. After telling her dad, Neil Batts, about archival photos she had seen in class, he led her to the box and told her to open it.
The box sat atop a coffee table, surrounded by framed family portraits and 1940s memorabilia, from American military flags to old spices and root beer powder. Inside, she discovered the works of her late paternal grandfather, John J. Batts, a World War II photographer.
Bella Batts wanted a “piece of him” she could look back on, so she enrolled in a documentary filmmaking class in the fall of 2025 and centered her project around him, she said.
The film, “Dad’s Dad,” was later chosen to be showcased at a special student film screening on April 3 as part of the Massachusetts Independent Film Festival in Worcester.
Soren Sorensen, her professor and the screen studies program director at Clark, said the university has partnered with MassIFF for years; the special screening is held there, and the organizer offers fee waivers to students and encourages them to submit their films.
Batts began her class project by interviewing her paternal grandfather’s only living relative that she’s in contact with — her dad.
She set her camera on a tripod and lit the crackling fireplace as her dad sank into his brown leather chair. For 40 minutes, he transported the two of them decades into the past and gave her a glimpse into what his parents were like.
“It was kind of like an emotional release for him,” she said. “He never thought to have this conversation with his dad about life, because he was so young when [his parents] died, and so it was kind of a way for him to have that conversation with me.”
When she was younger, Bella Batts said, her dad rarely discussed his side of the family. He would occasionally reveal small things about his parents, but she never asked questions or dug deeper.
She knew his mother liked Ella Fitzgerald and that he thought the two of them would have gotten along well due to their shared love for music, artwork, sewing, and cats. But she didn’t know much more than that. It felt inauthentic to call them her grandfather and grandmother, or make up her own names for them, Bella said, so she calls them her dad’s mom and her dad’s dad, the name that ultimately became the title of her film.
Bound by photography
Despite the distance she feels from her paternal grandparents, a common thread ties each generation together: photography. Her grandfather was a war photographer, her father is a portrait photographer, and now she studies photography as part of her college coursework.
Neil Batts said he sees a photograph as a “slot of time.”
“Yes, you’re looking at it as a flat, two-dimensional thing, and you can’t reach up to touch them, but you are in every way experiencing what that camera looked at many years ago,” he said. “That’s time travel.”
Bella said she has always been surrounded by photographs and other items belonging to her paternal grandparents, because the house originally belonged to them. Maura Batts, Bella’s mother, said even the flowers blooming around the house were first planted by Neil Batts’s parents.
“We’ve got three generations of Waylanders,” Bella said.
After Neil’s parents died, he owned the house alone until he met Maura several years later. One of the first items he showed her was a tape recording of his father singing “To the Tune of a Spanish Guitar,” which is featured in the film.
When the two had their twins, Bella and Jack, Neil Batts said he would play the cassette for them every once in a while and say, “That’s your grandfather.”
His father was fascinated by technology, he said, so there are also old radios, tape recorders, and cameras throughout the house. Being interviewed for the documentary gave him the opportunity to talk about the bygone era from which these items came.
“Growing up, there’s things that you see every day in your house, and you just take it for granted,” he said. “Then there’s one day you go, ‘Oh, that vase was my grandmother’s.’ Then it becomes something more.”
Now, as Bella walks around her house, she sees a story in every object, from the Air Force One helmet to the old trumpet. She said she hopes to interview her father again and uncover more documents to learn more about the generations that came before her.
“There’s always so much to discover with family history,” she said. “People need to document those stories so that they can live on.”
“Dad’s Dad” was released in December 2025 and is available to watch online via YouTube and FilmFreeway.
