Because imagination lives in a grey space of acceptance.

When you’re ten, it’s “adorable.” By twenty-five, it’s “grow up.” By forty, it’s “take your meds.”

In A Case For Coping, Maya, age ten, deals with the loss of her mother, but she doesn’t retreat into fantasy; she weaponizes it. As a hard-boiled detective, she recruits an imaginary informant to discover whether her mother is truly gone, or has simply gone missing, much to the dismay of her grieving grandfather, playing the role of weary police chief. Their game reopens Mom’s “cold case” and forces them both to admit the one truth they’ve been dodging: grief doesn’t disappear simply because time wills it.

So why am I telling this story now? Because too much pressure is put on kids to “prepare for the future,” while adults doom-scroll the present. My goal is to remind audiences to breathe and give them permission to retreat into their imaginations. Playing make-believe is not a childish hiccup. It can be a recipe for healing or, at the very least, stress-testing reality.

While filming, it was important that the idea of blurred reality came through in the story, but also showed visually across each scene. We filmed using a Sony Venice wearing Cooke anamorphic lenses, allowing Chicago’s alleyways to fray into slippery dreamscapes. Locked-off frames give way to handheld whenever Maya’s fantasy fractures.

Tonally, I’ve always loved the emotional and visual stories of Korean dramas. From Lee Chang-dong’s Burning for its slow fuse tension builder to Bong Joon Ho’s Memories of Murder for its uneasy humour, wide takes, and raw emotion. It’s also hard to ignore the influence that Cary Fukunaga’s True Detective (S1) had on this production for letting scenes breathe and whisper dark thoughts..

A Case For Coping was an incredible exercise in collaborating with a talented team of industry veterans while working with incredible actors across Chicago to bring this amazing short to life. I’m incredibly proud of the result while working within the constraints of indie filmmaking.