Genre
Synopsis
Everyone loses their parents. And if they don’t, well…the alternative is even worse, isn’t it?
GRIEF ALCHEMY PROJECT takes this universal truth and transforms it into an intimate documentary about home, loss, and the inheritance of displacement. After the death of her parents, the filmmaker, the American-born daughter of an Indian refugee of Partition and a Ukrainian immigrant whose parents fled to Brazil during World War II, must sell the house she grew up in.
The film follows her process of clearing, grieving, and ultimately releasing this home, which becomes a metaphor for the displacement both her parents experienced long before she was born. This is the spine of the film, around which buried histories of migration, war, and exile illuminate how colonialism and patriarchy shape the intimate geographies of family life.
Through lyrical personal essay, vérité footage, and what the director calls “film as ritual,” she explores how the act of letting go of this house mirrors her parents’ own journeys of displacement. Interweaving historical archival material, family home movies and slides, and present-day footage of the house’s transformation, the film becomes a meditation on belonging, inheritance, and the cyclical nature of loss.
It’s the story of two immigrants who built a tiny country of their own in an old Victorian house, and what it feels like to leave it behind forever.
Bio
Tara Anaïse is an Indian American writer/director. She is a Sundance Feature Film Program Fellow, an alum of the Fox Diversity Writers Program, and an Emmy nominee. Her début feature, Dark Mountain, was released by Gravitas Ventures and peaked at number 8 in iTunes top horror. Her upcoming projects include the features Bombay Blood, which she workshopped at the Sundance Screenwriters Intensive in Los Angeles, and Wildcats, a dark coming-of-age crime drama set in the California desert. She holds an MFA in film production from USC's School of Cinematic Arts and a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
