Piano Fingers

When I lost my father at 22, I didn’t just lose a parent, but lost the chance to understand him into my adolescence. For most of my life, I didn’t know he had Huntington’s Disease. His mood swings, forgetfulness and slow unraveling were never truly explained.

I was 23 when I got my diagnosis. I wasn’t ill yet, but I knew how my story might end. I also knew I couldn’t keep quiet about it. Piano Fingers began as a way to process that grief, but it quickly became something more urgent. I wanted to speak where generations before me had stayed silent.

This film is not a polished narrative with answers. It’s a memory in motion that's fragmented, unfinished and personal. It’s part diary, part letter to my father, part attempt to understand what it means to live with a future you cannot change.

In South Asian families, illness, especially neurological or mental illness, is wrapped in silence and shame. I’ve seen what that silence does. I’ve lived in it. This film is my way of breaking those shackles apart and witnessing what happens when I challenge the so-called norm. It documents the tenderness and tension within my own family, the humour that coexists with dread, and the questions we ask when we finally start talking.

I want to show what it means to live in the limbo between health and illness. Between knowing and not knowing. My brother chose not to test. I did. The film holds both our truths without judgment. It also holds the birth of my nephew - a moment that shifted everything, most importantly, my perspective towards how to live my own life. For the first time, we weren’t only looking back in fear. We were looking forward with love, hope, and a little caution.

As a South Asian filmmaker, I’ve rarely seen families like mine represented in stories of rare disease. When illness does appear, it's often through a Western lens - clinical, tragic, distanced. But in our homes, it’s messier and more intimate. It sits at the dinner table. It rewrites how we love, protect, and grieve. Piano Fingers is a chance to place this narrative, and others like it, into global cinema with emotional specificity, cultural honesty, and lived complexity.

Through my work in the global Huntington’s community, I’ve met others carrying this invisible burden. Many stay silent. I hope this film gives voice to the stories that are messy, mundane, defiant, and tender.

At its core, Piano Fingers is a daughter’s way of walking beside her father, even now, decades apart.