Short
Digital
Featured 🖤
Divide Magazine: Issue 12 (2024.12)
LAWeekly
23.98 fps
Color
My MFA thesis project.
In the quiet aftermath of her father’s passing, Olivia, an Asian American woman, retraces the contours of a life once familiar, journeying from the relentless pace of New York to the somber stillness of her hometown, Athens. Born from the ashes of her reflection, this trip allows her to capture this voyage as an elegy to the fading image of memories and the relentless march of time.
This film is a personal exploration of time, memory, and the forces that shape our lives. Inspired by my experiences during the summer of 2023, I found myself reflecting on the changes in my friends—many of whom had married—and how time and life choices had shifted our connections.
At the beginning of the year, my father was affected by the pandemic, prompting me to visit him during the summer break. On a flight from Shanghai to London, I met a Chinese woman returning to organize her deceased father’s belongings. Her struggle with sorting through old photos and albums mirrored my father’s own obsession with preserving memories. This sparked the core of this film’s narrative, in which Olivia comes to understand her father, Matthew, and his fixation with the past.
In addition to this personal journey, the film delves into a B-story that explores the themes of immigration, generational trauma, and the gap between social classes. Matthew, Olivia’s father, represents the first-generation immigrant experience. Though his life story is not explicitly detailed in the film, it is hinted at through fragments of dialogue and the photos he obsessively preserves. This obsession symbolizes the weight of his past, a burden that he unintentionally passes on to Olivia. Through Matthew’s character, I aim to illustrate how the traumas of the first generation of Asian immigrants reverberate through the lives of their children, shaping their experiences and choices.
The film also contemplates the possibility of this trauma being passed to the next generation through Lynn, who is pregnant. The question lingers: will the pain of the past continue to echo through the lives of those yet to come?
The film further examines the fragile nature of female friendship. Olivia has inherited her father’s expectations, leaving her too exhausted to resist the choices she once made. Lynn, on the other hand, faces the slow consumption of her vitality by marriage and motherhood. Their bond, once strong, becomes strained and eventually breaks under the pressures of patriarchal and marital forces. The film portrays the tension between their connection and the societal expectations that pull them apart.
As a filmmaker, I’m not interested in grand narratives, but in the intimate, specific stories that reveal the unstoppable forces of fate. Through Olivia and Lynn’s journey, I explore how our pasts, our friendships, and the roles imposed upon us shape who we are and where we go.