Tough Love

In this short experimental documentary, filmmaker Pat Heywood explores the experience of grief in the wake of his grandmother’s death.

Bringing together voicemail messages, family photographs, webcam recordings, spiritual lectures, and Super 8 footage, the film tracks a two-year period of emotional ups and downs. As Heywood discovers joy and sorrow in observing his childhood home in Massachusetts and his present-day home in New York, we are left to meditate on how our emotions are never as black and white as the stories we tell about them.

The ultimate question is bittersweet, and always topical: what can death teach us about life?