Director's statement:
"He'll be home soon" is born from a family memory and a question: what remains of a person when their absence becomes part of everyday life?
My grandfather was a sailor. His absence, after his death, led me to think about my grandmother and all those habits that can survive the person who made them possible. From this reflection comes the story of a woman who continues to live according to a daily routine built around someone who is no longer there.
I am not interested in portraying grief through the moment of loss or through an explicit display of pain. I am interested in what comes after, when pain has turned into habit. The protagonist does not confront her loss: she incorporates it into her gestures. She still prepares two coffees, keeps her husband’s uniform, tears off a page of the calendar every day, and continues to wait for him. Repetition thus becomes a form of resistance, but also a way of keeping an illusion alive.
The sea has a deeply personal meaning for me. I live near the sea and have always considered it a fundamental presence: something I can observe for long periods without anything apparently happening, letting myself be absorbed by its movement and its sounds. Its rhythm is both constant and unpredictable. It can be reassuring, but also unsettling.
In the film, I would like the sea to embody exactly this ambivalence. It will not simply be a place, but an almost living presence, capable of accompanying the protagonist and feeding her waiting. Its continuous movement contrasts with the woman’s stillness: the waves keep returning relentlessly, while what she is waiting for can no longer return.
The direction also stems from this idea. I want to leave space for time and observation, building the film through everyday gestures, silences, ambient sounds, and small variations within an apparently unchanging routine. I do not want to guide the viewer toward a precise explanation, but rather allow them to gradually enter the protagonist’s perception, until the boundary between what is real and what she wishes were real becomes uncertain.
For me, "He'll be home soon" is therefore a film about absence, but above all about the way love can survive the physical presence of someone. A story made of waiting, memory, and rituals, in which the sea keeps returning to the shore, even when someone can no longer do so.
