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For years, I remembered that answering machine message in my mum’s voice. I’d be calling from overseas, back when every second cost a small fortune. Waiting for her greeting to finish always felt so long when all I wanted was to leave a quick message. While we were sorting through Mum’s house, bursting at the seams with buried treasures, I found this little micro tape. It wasn’t working then, but when I recently had our old family film footage digitized, it miraculously came

I was organizing footage for my editor this weekend and came across film reel 015, which I had just had digitized. I’m two years old, dancing in my underwear in our apartment in Singapore, where we lived at the time, shaking my little groove thing, dancing like no one was watching. I’ve been feeling anxious about the upcoming trailer edit. I’d left a rambling voicemail for one of my producers, and he texted back right away: “Hey, wanna talk?” We jumped on a call, and as soon

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend a special event with Arundhati Roy. She was reading and speaking about her new book Mother Mary Comes To Me, the title an ode to the Beatles song Let It Be. Roy wrote, “In these pages, my mother, my gangster, shall live. She was my shelter and my storm.” A new filmmaker friend of mine in The Hague remembered that I was reading this book while preparing for my documentary, Unpacking Grief, and happened to have a spare ticket, which sh

It doesn’t take vacations. There’s no HR. No leave requests. No onboarding manual. No PowerPoint presentation. And yet, grief is not my boss. Not anymore. It has become a colleague. Supportive. Uplifting. Dare I say… even a friend. The strangest thing is grief has surprised me. It made me want to dance again. It made me want to write again. It pushed me to honor my parents. To wear their clothes and jewelry. To examine the things they left behind. And to connect with others w