A brief exchange between a mother and son reading a diary entry from his eighth birthday.
My 2008 Diary (2023) documents memory and language between a mother and son through revisiting a fifteen year old diary entry for the first time. An excerpt from a lengthy recorded interaction of a mother helping her adult son read the Chinese diary entries they had written as a child. The short film carves out a brief personal moment of connection, focused on the animated physical document that is a grey binder containing the childhood diary entries of a language the filmmaker can still speak, but has substantially forgotten how to read or write.
This rough cut for this short film premiered at Rendezvous With Madness Festival in Toronto September 2023, and has been screened as part of Transfiguration International Film Festival in LA, Chicago, Providence, and Toronto