Bekah Grim was seventeen when her parents packed her bags without telling her and sent her to a halfway house. A few days before her eighteenth birthday. Her parents had come out of a conservative Mennonite community, and Bekah's teenage rebellions — the ordinary kind — weren't something they had language for.
Years later, Bekah is in Leadville, Colorado, mushing Alaskan huskies and writing plays that she stages in local community theaters. She found herself through those two things. The dogs and the page. The wilderness and the audience.
When her mother comes to visit, the film holds both of them — a woman hoping to be forgiven, and a daughter who has built a whole life out of what she survived. What happens between them at the end of the film is the reason we made it.
I co-directed Mother Daughter with Dirk Rasmussen. After we filmed the conversation where Bekah forgives her mother, I sat with the footage for a long time before I could edit it. It changed what I thought I knew about reconciliation — what it actually takes, what it costs, what it makes possible. I'm still thinking about it.
Mother Daughter received the Audience Award at the Cannes Short Film Festival.