DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

家Jia means home in Chinese.

At age 17, I moved to Australia from a village in China. That was 16 years ago. The familiar has become distant and exists only as memories in photographs. But the sound of my mother’s voice and the love in her eyes still feel like home. There are 500,000 words in Chinese but my mother doesn’t know many because she never went to school. And over the years, we have fewer and fewer words to communicate as my Chinese deteriorates. But our love deepens despite the language, generational and cultural barriers. 

So I made Jia with almost no dialogues. It’s a letter to my mother. It encapsulates my deepest love for her but also my most terrifying fear and a secret that I am unable to tell in words.