Filmmaker Statement

While healing from the wounds of growing up with an abusive father, I found myself confronting the two versions of me shaped by that experience—the one who dreamt of running away, and the one who felt obligated to stay and earn his love. Shadow Dancing in the West emerged as a way to explore that internal split. The two brothers are not representations of my family, but of myself: two conflicting halves, shaped by patriarchal silence. In a fever dream, I made this with five friends, no budget, but with a deep longing to explore these feelings within the mythic bones of a western folktale. It’s a cosmic meditation on grief, identity, and confronting the shadow self. Through making this film, I learned that to dance with the shadow is to stop pretending it’s not there, and in doing so, we come one step closer to wholeness.