This film was my final for a summer program I did at Tisch. I wanted to explore the idea of being completely in your own world, and how easily you can start playing out different versions of a situation in your head. A few days before making the film, I had an experience that left me really stuck in my own head. I was also struggling to come up with an idea and felt like I was forcing myself to find a story when I didn't really have one. Eventually, I decided to stop looking for a complicated concept and just hold onto a feeling that I knew I could understand and that other people could probably recognize in some way too. What starts as a simple encounter sends a girl into her own world, where she plays out different scenarios and spirals through everything she could have said, done, or imagined happening instead. I intentionally never establish exactly who these two people are to each other. I wanted the audience to have to sit with that uncertainty and decide for themselves whether they were old friends, something more, or simply two people who had once meant something to each other. To me, the ambiguity makes the experience more personal because the audience isn't given a definite relationship to attach the emotions to. They're left to fill in the gaps with their own experiences. Without dialogue, I wanted to connect with the music. I connected with the songs I used before I even knew exactly what the film was going to be, and I spent a lot of time mixing and cutting them, experimenting with how they could interact with the visuals. I almost treated the sound like part of the mise-en-scène rather than something placed underneath the film afterward. I think I could’ve gone bigger with the film and had a more concrete story, and there are definitely things I would do differently now, but I am proud that it feels like me. Even in a film I know I would make differently today, I like that I can look back at it and recognize the way my mind works: getting lost in possibilities, building worlds around feelings, and leaving some things unresolved.
