Director's Note
 

As a child, my school's annual Children's Day celebration was the one day I looked forward to the most every year. Just for that day, we were allowed to wear whatever we wanted to school. Despite owning mostly hand-me-downs from my older sisters, I methodically planned what to wear each year.

​

I grew up in a family of six children, five of us being girls. It always felt like I would go through the school day as nobody, then go home and still be nobody. Putting together and existing in that special outfit for Children's Day was more than just shedding my school pinafore; it felt like I was molting the anxious, ugly loser I believed I was, and that I could be anyone, someone, other than me, for a day.

​

As an adult and filmmaker, I am fixated on memory, especially its trickle-down effects on people through the passage of time, and the bittersweet melancholy only it can bring. I think about the cycle of pain belted out by my violent father, borne by my mother, then passed down to us; their daughters. I have come to realize the grief of my hostile childhood never really left me, and that I just learned to grow around it somehow. I frequently think about the sensitivities of my young self every day, how I tried to navigate the space and tribulations of (the notion of) home, and how my self-negation could have been nipped as quickly as it had bloomed. And with that, I tried to write Xuan and give her the voice I wish I had.

​

The story of the film is inspired by one Children's Day from when I was eight years old. My best friend (then and now) asked that we match outfits and lip-gloss, and I agreed, despite having neither lip-gloss nor a new outfit. Children's Day is an ever-ebbing and flowing love letter to eight-year-old Giselle, and I hope everyone who watches the final film finds a bit of their eight-year-old self in it as well.