Every Time We Say Goodbye

Years ago, I was visiting my grandmother in Los Angeles when she invited me to open a drawer in her dresser and to take what I wanted. The drawer was crammed with photos and letters from the 1950s. The letters—some handwritten and loose, some typed, others stapled to their envelopes—were a true discovery.

They detailed a period of time in my family’s life that had until then only been alluded to or recounted in fragments: the years between 1955 and 1959 when my grandmother, who had five children and two miscarriages, experienced post-partum depression, which then triggered latent bipolar disorder. The letters are from my grandmother to her parents, her parents to my grandfather and my grandmother’s psychiatrist, etc. They document my grandmother and grandfather’s relationship as it crumbled and ended in divorce, and the breakdown of trust between all parties. But each letter contains a different version of events from a completely different point of view.

Every Time We Say Goodbye investigates my family’s competing narratives—my grandfather’s, my grandmother’s, my mother’s, my aunt’s, my own—embracing unanswerable questions and inventing the past in the absence of facts to see if each version of the story can contribute to the truth instead of undermining it.

Constructed from conversations with my family members, personal narration, archival materials, present day footage, and imagined scenes—all shot exclusively on Bolex and Super 8 cameras—Every Time We Say Goodbye is a creative non-fiction film about the pursuit of what is ultimately an unknowable truth. But that doesn’t make any of it less true.

Feature produced by Little Window Productions and Intuitive Pictures. In development.

Partners: Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec