VSFF: Best of 'Let Mama Go' Short Program

With nine solid films that explore different facets of mother-daughter relationships, spanning cultures, identities, and complexities, ‘Let Mama Go’ was an emotional and heartfelt program at the 2025 Vancouver Short Film Festival, leaving the audience with overwhelming emotions. For many of us, like myself, we rush to call our moms right after the screening. The well-curated program taps into topics of miscommunication, trauma, intergenerational differences, and healing, each film carrying such precise specificities that make them unique yet transcending to resonate with the audience.

And in the batch, here are the two films that have lingered the longest in me.

Desync (2024) - Directed by Minerva Navasca

Directed by Toronto-based director Minerva Navasca, Desync is a heartfelt and tender film that dissects the complexity of an immigrant mother-daughter relationship and all the things that remain unsaid. It follows Anna, a filmmaker who tries to reenact a memory with her mom, Celine, through a script. But this time, void of the hurt. In place for every insult that her mom has told her is Anna’s overcompensating script lines, like “You’re doing it all wrong!” to “I just feel like I’m losing you.” And maybe the latter is what her mom has always wanted to tell her.

At the heart of Desync lies the unreliability of memory, especially when fogged with so much resentment that one might as well melt into anger. In Anna’s memory, her interaction with her mom in the kitchen, spending time together, cooking tinola, and being in each other's presence after so much time apart, strips bare when the fight breaks out–all that she remembers now is how much her mother has hurt her. Coherent to human nature, it is easier to feel hurt than to feel loved. And just like so many children, specifically children of immigrants, we assign our pain to our parents’ shortcomings. Now that Anna has a chance to direct and rewrite this hurt, she wants to make it perfect. After every take, director Anna adds another line to the script, and another line, until the actors question such excessive addition: what exactly are they doing wrong in their performance?

You can also see Anna's assertion on making it right lies in her shooting set: the overly bleak, harsh lighting with tints of cold hues draping the kitchen set and the perfectly positioned pots and pans. This setting is the exact opposite of her mother’s kitchen, embraced in the warmth of oak wood cabinets and plants, somewhere that is visually home and feels lived in by souls bound to one another. So, why is it that her memory leaves out all of this and hangs onto Celine’s cuts that open in Anna's consciousness unmendable wounds? As an immigrant daughter, I suppose it is one way we cope and detach ourselves from feeling guilty, to overlook what our mothers have been through so that we can feel comfortable in our anger. And maybe, it is feasible to end Desync there.

But Navasca’s ingenuity cuts such an expectation short. Instead, she continues pushing us to question why immigrant parents, and eventually their children, say things they do not mean. Why does our best intention always arrive at a place of passive aggression, resentment, or miscommunication? The answer the film proposes is–that both Anna and Celine are hurt, and their memory is unreliable. Towards the end, we see Celine opening up her heart to Anna: she can feel Anna drifting away, and with every fight, she feels like losing grip. In Celine’s memory of the kitchen interaction, everything she says upsets Anna and makes her own daughter want to get out. To a mother, it must feel like a stab in one’s heart.

I do not think Navasca includes Celine’s point of view for the sake of impartiality but rather shows that our memory can be unreliable, therefore desyncing two people from a shared memory. And with that, how easily it can cascade to miscommunication. Perhaps all we can do, really, is to listen and to hold so that at least we can see where we have missed one another.

Have I Swallowed Your Dreams (2024) - Directed by Clara Chan

Right after the screening of the film at VSFF: Let Mama Go program, I immediately came home to my mom and asked her: “Have I swallowed your dream?” That was how moving and honest the film was, bursting with colors and conversations so many of us as immigrant daughters seek.

Have I Swallowed Your Dreams is an animation capturing a soft, heartwarming conversation between an immigrant daughter and her mother about dreams and sacrifices. In the opening scene, we see an elderly lady enter a cafe shop, joining her daughter Amy for tea. As Amy traces her mother’s features with her eyes from across the table–wrinkles folding her once youthful skin, frailer frame yet steady, tender hands embroidering the fabric–she starts to wonder if she has swallowed her mom’s dreams. The animation leads us into the depth of Amy’s eyes, trailing back to her mother’s upbringing in China. In visiting Amy’s interior, we see her mother, once a little girl who is always eager to be in class, at school, and learning new things. Each stroke that animates her mother’s younger self is that of soft lining, framing her face in a bob-cut with bangs haircut and breathing life back into a memory that seems distant. The audience then learns that Amy’s mother dreamt of being an architect and constructing buildings enwreathed with beautiful colours. But then Amy came along, and in her words, swallowed the mother of her dreams.

What is so beautiful about Have I Swallowed Your Dreams is the seamless transition between each frame, which feels like a deep inhale, walking the audience through one’s full personal history. Amy then narrates the family’s move abroad to seek a better life, where her mother worked in a clothing factory. In a slow zooming into the fabric that Amy’s mother meticulously traces, embroideries appear as words describing the hardships she had to endure: racism, sexism, dreams left behind, and the burden of being a mother.

`The audience is then transcended to the deep inhale of Amy’s mother as she gives Amy a response, “No, you have not swallowed my dreams,” a gentle voice of an older woman answers. In the mother’s consciousness, Amy is the beating heart of her world, breathing colours into the cold winters and slow seasons, all depicted through delicate drawings from the animation itself. One thing that differentiates her world to Amy is bolder, more vibrant colours, fitting seamlessly to how she sees Amy’s presence in her life: a garden full of different blooming flowers. The animation is now more abstract, free-form, and completely experimental, which feels liberating.

As an immigrant daughter, Amy’s persistent doubt and guilt of her presence stripping another soul of the life they deserve to have, one freed from responsibility, expectations, and burden, hits it home every frame. But with so much groundedness in its approach and dialogue, specifically when hearing it from the perspective of Amy’s mother, that perhaps motherhood is what brings newness, tendering a child from birth to adulthood, I feel like I could exhale a little bit.