Until We Meet Again (2026)
Experimental film, 8mins
Starring: Shanmu Sun
Additional cameras: David Handforth, Laneecia Ricks (LA)
Until We Meet Again is a speculative documentary that combines live-action performance, stop-motion animation, and analogue photographic processes to explore grief, migration, memory, and intergenerational relationships within East Asian families. The film began after the passing of my grandmother in 2025, when my father mailed me a package containing her belongings. In the film, this package becomes the point of departure for a dreamlike journey between memory and reality.
The film follows a granddaughter who repeatedly dreams of her grandmother returning in the form of a monarch butterfly. Guided by this imagined presence, she moves through fragmented memories, ritual gestures, and moments of reflection as she attempts to reconnect across distance and loss. The monarch butterfly’s multigenerational migration serves as a guiding metaphor throughout the film. Traveling across vast distances over several generations, its movement becomes a way to think through diaspora, inherited memory, and the uncertain process of finding connection across time and space.
Through voiceover and tactile imagery, the film reflects on how love and care are often expressed indirectly in my family through labor, routine, and everyday gestures rather than spoken language. Alongside 16mm footage and live-action scenes, many sequences are constructed frame by frame by hand using printed photographs, paper cutouts, scanning, and reassembly. This fragile and repetitive process mirrors the emotional structure of the work itself, where acts of making become a way of holding grief, distance, and remembrance together.
Experimental film, 8mins
Starring: Shanmu Sun
Additional cameras: David Handforth, Laneecia Ricks (LA)
Until We Meet Again is a speculative documentary that combines live-action performance, stop-motion animation, and analogue photographic processes to explore grief, migration, memory, and intergenerational relationships within East Asian families. The film began after the passing of my grandmother in 2025, when my father mailed me a package containing her belongings. In the film, this package becomes the point of departure for a dreamlike journey between memory and reality.
The film follows a granddaughter who repeatedly dreams of her grandmother returning in the form of a monarch butterfly. Guided by this imagined presence, she moves through fragmented memories, ritual gestures, and moments of reflection as she attempts to reconnect across distance and loss. The monarch butterfly’s multigenerational migration serves as a guiding metaphor throughout the film. Traveling across vast distances over several generations, its movement becomes a way to think through diaspora, inherited memory, and the uncertain process of finding connection across time and space.
Through voiceover and tactile imagery, the film reflects on how love and care are often expressed indirectly in my family through labor, routine, and everyday gestures rather than spoken language. Alongside 16mm footage and live-action scenes, many sequences are constructed frame by frame by hand using printed photographs, paper cutouts, scanning, and reassembly. This fragile and repetitive process mirrors the emotional structure of the work itself, where acts of making become a way of holding grief, distance, and remembrance together.
Film still from Until We Meet Again / 不说再见, 2026
Experimental film, 8 minutes