Making a Strange Film in Strange Times
Continuous shedding and a January project update.
I’m writing this on January 7, the one year anniversary of the fires that devastated my city. I can still feel that night. The heat and unease as the Santa Ana winds tore through my hilltop neighborhood. The blackout. That fireplace smell when there’s no fireplace around. The dread as I stepped out on my porch and saw what I now know was the Eaton Fire spark on the distant mountains and start burning. And burning. And burning.
I was lucky. I wasn’t evacuated. I didn’t lose anything, physically anyway, but the emotional toll a disaster like that takes on the collective psyche of a city is no joke.
It feels at once a lifetime ago and like it just happened. It was the start of this great shedding that’s been continuing for me, but that I hope will wrap up as the Year of the Snake comes to an end in February.
But who knows — we’re only a week into 2026 and it’s already shaping up to be a hell of a year. The U.S. military kidnapping Nicolás Maduro and his wife with Trump yet again shamelessly saying the quiet part out loud about taking Venezuela for their oil, not mention people making a shitload of money by betting on it, and ICE agents fatally shooting a woman in Minnesota for literally no reason.
Is this going to be the year I have to strip both the house I grew up in and the country of my birth from my life? It’s a lot to deal with.
The other day, in that liminal space between waking and sleeping, I heard my dad say my name and it woke me up. Later, I got the feeling that my mom was mentally saying to me, “Get outta here!” but not in the context of leaving the U.S., rather, I think she meant wrap this shit up with the house already.
I’m trying, Mom!
Which brings me to this month’s update on Grief Alchemy Project, the experimental hybrid doc I’m making as part of the NonDē 50 Films Project for 2026 organized by Courtney Romano.
If you missed my first post about it, you can read it here:
Can I Write a Memoir, but Make it Film?
In Grief Alchemy Project, a first generation filmmaker intertwines her ancestors’ parallel stories of exile from Sindh and Ukraine with the process of selling the house she grew up in – her late parents’ old Victorian in suburban New Jersey – transmuting personal grief into a cinematic ritual spanning continents and generations: a meditation on home and homeland, memory, and the inherited trauma of displacement.
I’ll start off with a logistical recap: I’ve shot four (less than full) days so far of verité footage and b roll. A town-wide yard sale we participated in, a visit with a specialist from an auction house who came to take a look at my parents’ collection of prints and antique rugs, me packing up some things around the house, and some b roll of houses in the neighborhood decorated for Halloween and lit up for Christmas to signify the passage of time.
This weekend I’ll shoot some Super 8 footage myself. Interiors and exteriors. Sunlight shining through the lace curtains in the dining room window casting patterned shadows on the patterned rug. Bare tree branches and blue sky. Artwork that’s been hanging in the same spot on the wall for forty years. Etc.
I’ve also been working on a detailed outline and started writing voice over so I can figure out how I want to shape the film.
I had an idea for a series of shots that will be interspersed throughout — I will sit in all of the main eight rooms (living room, dining room, kitchen, TV room, and four bedrooms) and let the emotions contained in each room pass through me so I can process them. Each room will be filmed in a single static wide, impeccably framed and beautifully lit, so it almost looks like a painting, or a Gregory Crewdson photo.
This will be shot on 4K — Alexa Mini, unsure about the lenses currently — and will be super cinematic.
I had this idea because as I’ve been in the house, I’ve had these experiences where I feel like I’m taking on emotions that aren’t my own. They’ll hit out of nowhere and I’ll be completely overwhelmed (and usually cry/sob, although today I felt a crazy bit of anxiety) and if I let myself just kind feel them as much as possible and then let them pass through me, they do. And I feel like I’ve released them.
Strange, I know, but this is a grief alchemy project, right?
Another thing I want to do is use mirrors and reflections as a motif, to make things feel a bit disorienting and also give a stylistic call out to the fact that I’m a filmmaker documenting my own experience.
And finally, I’ll leave you with a few interesting finds from the house:
Until next time,
Tara
Wow the lineage of spiritual searching is such a strong anchor here.