FOIEGRAS | 2023
Short Film | Experimental Narrative
Synopsis
After discovering that the man she believed to be her father is not biologically related to her, eighteen-year-old Jay struggles to reconcile the collapse of her identity with the emotional silence surrounding her family. Living between the presence of a controlling grandmother and a father unable to confront the truth, Jay escapes inward through fantasies centered around a boy next door — a projection of freedom, power, intimacy, and desire.As reality fractures around her, fantasy becomes both refuge and self-destruction.Themes / Exploration
Foie Gras explores inherited silence, fractured identity, shame, desire, and the emotional instability that follows the collapse of familial truth. The film examines the tension between intimacy and performance, and the ways fantasy can become a psychological survival mechanism during moments of emotional rupture.The title references foie gras — a delicacy produced through the force-feeding of geese — serving as a metaphor for emotional suppression, inherited control, and the slow suffocation that occurs when truth is withheld within family structures.Drawing from personal experience, the film approaches memory not as realism, but as an unstable emotional landscape shaped through desire, symbolism, sensuality, and psychological fragmentation.Process / Visual LanguageThe film was approached through a hybrid visual language combining naturalistic performance with surreal and symbolic imagery. I was interested in exploring emotional states through texture, atmosphere, bodily detail, fantasy sequences, and cinematic tension between softness and discomfort.Rather than presenting trauma directly, the work investigates how desire, projection, and fantasy become temporary forms of escape from emotional disorientation. The visual world moves between intimacy and unreality, using sensual imagery and psychological symbolism to blur the line between internal fantasy and lived experience.
LUNCH
Short Film | 2025 | Experimental Narrative
Synopsis
After years of estrangement, two sisters reunite with their internationally celebrated artist mother for an urgent lunch. During the meeting, their mother reveals she is terminally ill and asks her daughters to decide whether they will help end her life through assisted euthanasia.
As old wounds resurface, the sisters are forced to confront the emotional contradictions of loving a woman who simultaneously shaped and damaged them. Raised within the shadow of their mother’s artistic legacy — and used as subjects within her work from childhood — both women have spent their adult lives attempting to distance themselves from her influence while unconsciously carrying its psychological weight.
What begins as a contained family meeting slowly unravels into an exploration of resentment, desire, identity, performance, and inherited emotional patterns.THemes / Exploration
Lunch explores intergenerational trauma, female identity, authorship, emotional inheritance, and the complicated relationship between admiration and resentment within family structures. The film is interested in how unresolved emotional histories continue to shape adult intimacy, sexuality, ambition, and self-perception.
At its core, the story examines women attempting to reclaim authorship over their own identities after growing up inside another person’s mythology. The mother’s role as a celebrated visual artist becomes both literal and symbolic — representing the ways image-making, narcissism, and performance can distort intimacy and emotional truth.
The project approaches trauma not through spectacle, but through tension, humor, contradiction, sensuality, and observation. Desire and sexuality function throughout the film as both forms of escapism and attempts at liberation from inherited psychological patterns.process / Visual Language
The film was developed through an observational and performance-driven approach, balancing dark humor, emotional discomfort, intimacy, and surreal undertones. Visually, I was interested in creating tension between polished surfaces and psychological instability — using controlled framing, bodily detail, conversational rhythm, and moments of sensuality to reveal emotional fractures beneath composure.
Although grounded in dialogue and character interaction, the project incorporates elements of surrealism and emotional fragmentation to reflect the instability of memory, identity, and perception within family relationships.
The larger feature-length project expands beyond the lunch itself into a darkly comedic road narrative following the sisters as they navigate the emotional aftermath of their mother’s request, confronting questions of responsibility, forgiveness, agency, and self-definition.
LIKE FOAM
Short Film | 2022 | Experimental Moving Image
Synopsis
A young woman attempts to process the psychological aftermath of childhood sexual abuse through ritualistic acts of cleansing, repetition, and bodily isolation. Haunted by fragmented memories and recurring internal monologues, she moves through a series of intimate gestures — bathing, smoking, running, drifting between states of dissociation and awareness — while attempting to separate herself from the emotional residue of the past.
As memory resurfaces in waves, the boundary between physical reality and psychological space begins to dissolve.Themes / Exploration
Like Foam explores bodily memory, repression, shame, dissociation, and the lingering psychological imprint of traumatic experience. The work is interested in the ways the body continues to carry emotional histories long after conscious attempts to suppress or escape them.
Rather than approaching trauma through linear narrative, the film investigates the quieter and more fragmented processes of survival — the repetitive behaviors, rituals, and coping mechanisms that emerge in an attempt to regain control over one’s internal world.
The recurring image of milk functions as both a cleansing ritual and a symbolic gesture toward purification, softness, nourishment, and suffocation simultaneously. Throughout the film, everyday actions become emotionally charged spaces where memory and sensation resurface unexpectedly.Process / Visual Language
The film was developed through an experimental and highly sensory approach combining internal monologue, fragmented imagery, bodily detail, and surreal visual symbolism. I was interested in creating an emotional rather than narrative structure — one that reflects the instability of memory and the cyclical nature of intrusive thought.
Visually, the project moves between intimacy and abstraction, using texture, repetition, darkness, softness, and ritualized movement to create a psychological atmosphere suspended between dream state and lived reality.
The work forms part of an ongoing exploration within my practice surrounding embodiment, emotional inheritance, identity fragmentation, and the tension between internal experience and outward performance.
