Dear cinephile,

The day has come… The film is nigh. When I wrote this movie, it was this sort of scream into the void– Hey!! I’m here!! I feel insane!! Is anyone else here?? Haha… Help??!! And it’s genuinely such a surreal, bizarro, life-affirming, scary, devastating and ultimately euphoric thing to have it now exist outside of my body, in its final form, though is anything ever final, I don’t know...

I looked up the symptoms of baby blues, and while having a baby is so much more insane and hard than this, because it’s a real, live thing with a heartbeat that turns into a grownup (I know the difference between a movie and a baby and the weight of those things is what I’m saying, I promise I know the difference.) Still, I can’t help but feel this little pocket of emptiness inside me, like something that was living in me for so long is now out there, ready to be perceived and loved and hated and adored and destroyed and all that comes with something being its own entity. People call putting out a movie a release. I never really understood the full meaning of that until now. So I’m trying to release it… to you? If you’ll have it? Obviously I’m mildly unwell seeing as none of the sentences I’m writing go together.

A few words about Sorry, Baby the film… I wanted to tell a story about the intimacy and romance of friendship, about how living with a cat can save your life, about how a sandwich can make a day better. I wanted to make a film about a person desperately trying to heal, everyday, and how painstakingly slow healing can feel, how it’s very one-step-forward-seven-steps-back. It’s a film about how a friend holding you can keep you alive. About how much it heals when someone isn’t trying to fix you or hide from your pain; they’re just holding it and listening to it. I hope the film feels like it’s holding you, too, as a good friend would. I hope the film can feel like a hug.

Something scary about life is how random it can feel. So pain is just happening to me? And it’s inevitable? And it has no purpose but to hurt me? But the special thing about a movie is you get to craft a story out of all that randomness of real life, you get to make a whole out of little parts of life that don’t feel like they exist for any reason but to confuse you. This is the beauty of film! How lucky are we! We get to try to make meaning out of nothing! Together! In a dark room where we’re all looking in the same direction so we can cry with no one knowing it’s you crying! But we are all in the pitch black room feeling together, and we never even have to talk to each other! It’s a perfect social/antisocial experience. It’s actually crazy that movies exist! What!? Why am I so emotional… This is insane. I have the baby blues.

It was a great, great honor to have made Sorry, Baby with so many brilliant filmmakers by my side. I can’t believe I get to share it with you. With you! Who are you? I love you. Thank you for being on the other side of this letter, and on the other side of this film. I feel like I’m bursting at the seams. And so, with this letter, I release! I am releasing…………. Now. To you.

With gratitude and love and slight panic as always,

Eva