Filmmaker Statement

Over the past three years, COVID-19 has taken the lives of more than one million Americans. Nearly one-fifth of us knew someone among them. All of us have been impacted. In a culture that avoids talk of death and puts grief on a timeline, what does our mourning look like? How will we manage the voids the pandemic has created? Our Daisy explores what happens when we refuse to grapple with these questions in the wake of a pandemic. After 1918, people rushed to move on and get back to normal. Few communities made space, physically or emotionally, for public grief and public remembrance. As a result, the Influenza’s history and memory receded into obscurity. Stories of the Influenza and the lives it took — like Daisy’s — are now hard to retrace. They’re even hard to talk about. In Our Daisy, my collaborators and I experimented with what it felt like to keep going anyway, to keep talking, to keep asking about Daisy even when her archival trail went cold. 100 years from now, will it be easier for folks to talk about COVID? Will we make room for COVID in our history and memory? Or will gravestones and a few scattered remnants be the only pieces of the story we leave behind?