Director‘s Statement:
My mother and I never had the experiences of ordinary people: living under the same roof, each in our own room.
When my mother was young, she opened a photography studio, and I lived in an attic with no door, while my mother lay on the stairs to lull me to sleep. Later, I lived in dorms, hotels, and relatives’ homes, until I ended up in a rental house. The photography studio has since been torn down.
A few years ago, to encourage me to come home earlier for the Chinese New Year, my mother and father used some of the money meant for renovating the ancestral house to build a new one. I sat on the sofa, feeling that everything was unfamiliar. My mother said she felt the same. I suddenly realized that we didn't understand each other's lives at all.
In this short film, I asked my mother to mimic the Hakka dialect she wasn't familiar with, to teach me the elements of what a home should be (she’s from Sichuan and married in Guangdong). She was shy, joked around, and wasn’t used to it, but we laughed together.
Visually, I used out-of-focus images to break the continuity of the scene, with the shots gradually becoming clearer, as though building a house. These fragments include me and my friend and partner setting up a tent, 3D models of my apartment, sound effects from the game Stardew Valley where you build a home, and a dragonfly morphing inside the tent.
My mother and I built our own homes, each for ourselves.