Director’s Statement

I’ve been documenting this story my entire life. When I was little, I would spend hours upon hours hidden away in my room recording every detail of it, as if through writing it down on paper I could imbue it all with meaning. As if documentation could decode the cypher that was—and is—my family, ungraspable to the mind of a child, and still elusive to me to this day: My older brother, a true artist, at war with alcohol, drugs, and undiagnosed bi-polar disorder. The unpredictable violence of my home, vivid bouts of viciousness in stark contrast to the waning mirage of my father’s presence, my sister’s absence. My mother—like my brother, and eventually myself—beholden to an alcohol addiction that she nursed in the shadows of these absences. Her soft cries to friends over the phone as she laid in our bathtub each night, drinking boxed wine out of coffee mugs. The locks she had installed on our bedroom doors to protect us from my brother as he got older, got stronger, more volatile. For what seemed like several lifetimes, I stood alone in my room, a little girl frozen in fear, a phone with 911 dialed and thumb poised, waiting for her to scream loud enough to persuade me to get my brother locked up again. But no matter what we did, he always came back—a snake eating its own tail, ad infinitum.

Like light leaking over undeveloped film, years of trauma soon engulfed my memory in a relentless erasure, leaving it nebulous and strange. Even in the intervals when it revisited me, there was no one to confide in, no one to relate to, no real language to transmit my diminishing reality. What was already dysfunctional soon became disfigured, my understanding of our family—of any family—dissolving into distortion. I began to spend more and more time disappearing into my writing, magnifying every fragment of memory until they all disintegrated, the synaptic Hi8 tapes within my mind worn down to nothing by repeated over-processing. All that remained was sound and feeling, a collage saturated with an ever-present stain of grief. I needed the truth. I needed to know what had happened to us like the dying need water. Though memory abandoned me, the war never had— every slamming car door a fist through drywall. Every siren on every city street headed towards my home. A palimpsest of past transposing itself on present, every moment somehow years ago and exactly now simultaneously.

After years of therapy, and in the midst of my own addiction, I realized that nothing was resolved. What plagued me and poisoned my family was still plaguing me and poisoning my family. I came to a resolution. I would make this film, tell my story if it was the last thing I did on earth. I never doubted it could be. I set out on a year-long journey traversing the emotionally and physically taxing terrain of the past, visiting each family member to interview and film them in their distant homes, half of which I had never been to. My brother in London, my father in Connecticut, my mother in Nebraska, my sister in Colorado. I dragged my best friend and cinematographer along with me, scoured over twenty hours of Costco-scanned home videos from my childhood, embarked on a life-and-death errand to shoot a road film through the rugged landscape of my own psyche. Yes—I would find the truth. Or I would find something, anything, to set me free.

What I hoped to discover was some kind of new information. Something to fill in the cavernous mental blank spots perforating my childhood, something that would forever change my story. Over and over, I poured through the home videos alone in my apartment, searching for evidence of my existence. Over and over, I disappeared into myself. Became the girl standing alone in the locked bedroom. Became the mirage, the fist. Became the scream. Realized there was no revelation, everything exactly as it was. Nothing and nobody coming to save me—nobody to save me but me. I found sobriety. I surrendered. Allowed each of my family members’ stories to unfold from their own perspectives, their own truths. Not the ones I needed, or even the ones that were real, but the ones they could provide.

Within the fire where I was born, I found only more fire. Within the fire of myself, I found myself. This is the unconfirmed story of my life. My family. This is what happened to us. I’m here to tell you what I know.