My brother died, and the grief rearranged everything I thought I knew about storytelling, about family, about what a camera is for. I needed to make something that held the truth of what happened without flattening it into a message.

Yerham is not a film about bipolar disorder. It’s not a film about suicide. It’s a film about what happens after — showcasing the way grief lives in a Palestinian household specifically: in the food, in the gathering, in the words spoken between people who are trying to say the unsayable. I wanted to show that our mourning is not abstract. It has a texture, a temperature, a sound.

The film features my real life family and was filmed in our actual childhood home. The food on the tables is our food. The cemetery is the real cemetery. The line between documentary and narrative dissolves when the people on screen are living the story they’re telling. That collapse is the point.

The goal is for audiences to feel what it’s like to be in the room. Not to understand grief from the outside, but to sit with it, the way my family does — with laughter and silence and food and tears, sometimes all in the same five minutes. If someone watches this film and recognizes something they’ve never seen on screen before, then it did what it was supposed to do.