Filmmaker Statement

I stood in the darkness on the end of a lonely Bournemouth pier one night in 2018, under a full moon. The air was very still – I couldn’t even hear the waves on the shore. I was somehow transfixed by the moon’s reflection on the water. I couldn’t stop staring at it, and my mind couldn’t stop calling out: “mother”. In hindsight perhaps it was the wounds’ freshness, of my estranged mother’s disapproval of my personhood that happened to be queer – but back then I didn’t have the agency I do now. That night I found a great solace in that moon on the water, like I was in some cosmic womb, but yet still so… wholesomely mobile... I would spend the next 2 years improvising, reimagining that ocean, on days where I had to grapple with my statelessness, and on days where I didn’t want to. All I knew was understanding what that ocean meant had more personal value to me than any tangible solution to my statelessness, and that the more I worked on the film, the clearer I could see the moon.