Saudade: The Film

Because sometimes in order to cope with the present, we have to travel back in time…

Here’s how a major loss in my life led me to Cuba and inspired me to shoot SAUDADE, my first documentary short film.

It’s been ages since I’ve updated this blog. A lot has happened since then. Most notably, I just completed my first documentary short film and it has been selected to screen at its first film festival. But let’s backtrack a bit. You are probably wondering…I thought she was chasing nostalgia, when did she start making films?

Since my last post about the 24 Hour Photo Project where I documented the people, places, and things I encountered throughout New York City in a 24 hour period, along with over 4,000 photographers doing the same around the world, I became very interested in further documenting life around me and my adventures in nostalgia. I bought new camera equipment and started taking documentary filmmaking classes. I worked on a few new projects and was making progress in building what I thought could be an excited and new career. Then I lost everything.

All of my life’s work, the recent projects, along with treasured family photos and home movies, all gone, at the crash of one faulty hard drive.

A little bit about me…

I had a lengthy career in criminal investigations — and also professional acting (you would be surprised how closely these two are related) — which I left behind to fill my biggest role yet, caregiver to my aging and ailing grandparents, and later my mother-in-law who was hit twice with terminal cancers. All the while, I wrote stories, studied filmmaking, and began taking steps toward building this new career. A career I thought ended in that one swift computer accident.

Oh, I cried that day…and cried. Then after crying my eyes out for several more days, I applied for a workshop at a film school I had never heard of in Cuba. It seemed to have great reviews and major filmmakers and producers had taught there. I had recently returned from my first trip ever to Cuba, so my thoughts still wandered back to that mysterious and complex island. But most of all, I liked how disconnected it was from this fast-moving world. People still connected there, just in different ways. And the pace was something I could keep up with while I figured out a way out of my mental haze. I was desperate. I needed an out. Something different. Cuba was it. 

I was accepted into the school program, packed a bag (actually several bags) with everything I thought I would need (and then some), and off I went to study documentary filmmaking for three weeks at the world-renowned Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV (EICTV). While there, I was intent on also tracking down some lost family memories. I didn’t know where to begin, but like everything else, I’d soon figure it out.

The end result:

SAUDADE, the first short documentary film I directed and produced following that hard drive debacle of 2019. The film has been submitted to several film festivals and it has already been selected to screen at the NewFilmmakers Film Festival in New York. I’m still awaiting news on the others, but this has been an amazing way to begin again.

Some say never to make permanent decisions in temporary circumstances…they are partly right. But in this case, while my feelings of devastation that day might have been temporary, the loss was real and permanent. Nostalgia has always been this coping mechanism for me, but when there is nothing nostalgic left to reflect on, how could one find a way to heal? I had to go back and retrieve these memories some way. To find something to remind me of the way things were.

I will never get those exact photos and that video footage back, but there is a way to recover and hang on to the feelings and memories that they evoked. And so that is what I set off to do, and in the process, I recovered something I never even had — but somehow missed more than anything. That is SAUDADE.

Saudade is an untranslatable Portuguese term that refers to a melancholic longing and yearning of sorts for something that might never have happened or existed. In the film, we meet people entangled in feelings of this form of missingness, we visit places that illicit this quiet sense of something lost, and we encounter things that leave us pining for a glimpse of something we’ve never seen before.  

This journey in time, is just another one of my adventures in nostalgia. And it has only just begun. I am going to keep pursuing these interests for now. I’ll keep working on more documentary-style projects centered on nostalgic themes, as well as investigative and human interest stories. And we’ll see where all of this takes us. In the meantime, stay tuned! SAUDADE may be screening at a theater near you!