Filmmaker Statement

I have been traveling between New York and Spain for the last three years. When I first arrived in Spain, the daily headlines about the drownings of migrants at sea caught my attention. The people dying were being smuggled from Morocco on inflatable dinghies not much bigger than canoes. Most of them were from North and West Africa. The temptation of a place like Spain was the same as the one the U.S. had for my mother — a job and a future. Standing in Morocco, you can literally see the lights in Europe each night across the Strait of Gibraltar. As the boats sank and the tragedies piled up, I started to wonder: How does a family find closure after a shipwreck? The headlines never went beyond that day’s news. The relatives of those who go missing are often left with unfinished text conversations and social-media posts from their loved ones. But to move on, one needs a body to bury. I wanted to know what takes place when a body washes ashore and to depict the process on film.