Strand by Strand

At the core, Strand by Strand is about the moment you become the parent to your parent. It’s the painful realization that, if we’re lucky enough to have them for long enough, one day we may be the ones caring for our parents in the way they once cared for us. When I picked my mom up from LAX after not seeing her for eight months, the first thing she said was, “Sophia, how can you leave the house without brushing your hair?” I still remember being six years old, sitting on my mom’s bed while she wore her deep maroon nightgown, blow-drying my hair with absolute care. I have two sisters, and this ritual of femininity has been passed down through generations. Even now, at twenty-seven, my mom travels from South Africa to Los Angeles with curlers, brushes and clips packed in her suitcase. Doing our hair, putting on lipstick, making sure we look beautiful, this is one of her languages of love. My grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and even in the hardest stages of the disease, it remained important to her that her hair was done and her lipstick was on. That image has stayed with me. My work tends to live at the intersection of heartache and humor. When I’m faced with death, heartbreak or the other pains of life, my instinct is often to find something funny inside them. I process grief through comedy. The day I found out my dad had died, my best friend came over and, somehow, I cracked a joke. Strand by Strand comes from that same instinct. It is my way of sitting with the fear that the relationships we depend on will inevitably change, and that life continues moving forward whether or not we are ready for it. I’m surrounded by strong, intense, beautiful women. The thought that one day one of these women might have to surrender some of the independence that defines her scares me deeply. Heather’s vivacity, vanity, humor and stubbornness are as important to me as her dementia. I don’t want her illness to erase the woman she has always been. I’m a South African filmmaker living in Los Angeles. Over the years, I’ve directed commercials, music videos and short films. Most recently, I wrote and produced a short film that similarly uses humor to explore grief and family: three sisters illegally scatter their Catholic mother’s ashes over their Jewish father’s grave in an Orthodox cemetery.