Gentle

Gentle is not my story—but it’s one I felt deeply called to hold with care.

The script, written by Sara Decou, is deeply personal to her—a poetic reflection on grief, memory, and the quiet ways womanhood shapes how we carry love and loss. As someone who is a daughter, a sister, and a child of a mother, I recognized pieces of myself in it—especially in the spaces between the words. The silences. The longing. The protection we try to offer and the protection we wish we had.

In approaching this film, I wanted to move with delicacy—to slow everything down and let the emotional weight of each moment breathe. I tried to treat the imagery like memory: soft at the edges, fragile in places, sometimes disjointed, always intimate.

My role was to listen—to the script, to Sara, to the emotional resonance that felt buried in even the quietest parts. I focused on creating a visual language that held space for contradiction: safety and helplessness, warmth and detachment, closeness and heartbreak.

Gentle isn’t just about one kind of grief. It’s about all the small ones that live inside us. The ones passed between mothers and daughters and sisters. The ones we don’t always know how to name.

—Alex Naghavi